Walking back the cat

It's been a while since I posted to my blog. Last week I worked a ton (53 hrs + about 15 hrs commute time) and on the weekend I BINGED on Guild Wars. By binge, I mean I played until 3AM on Friday, got up on Saturday morning and played from 8:30 to midnight with about an hour break, then on Sunday morning from 8:00 to 10:30, at which point I played for a couple hours more later in the day before burning out. It was strictly a weekend event, as the game isn't even released yet, but I enjoyed it immensely.

During this time I listened to "The Company: A Novel of the CIA", which I really enjoyed. Last night, I had finished the book, and found an email in my Yahoo mailbox. It was from a woman who had recently moved into my neck of the woods and was looking to hook up with me, based on seeing my "Big Church" profile. I emailed her back, and got an autoreply that said she was using this match site for her email correspondance. To email someone on the match site, you need to sign up for it.

I started to smell a scam. So I began walking back the cat. The email was coming from a domain that was owned by another email host, which provided both pop and webmail. They had numerous domains you could choose from, and while going to www..com brought me there, this particular wasn't one of the ones they offered. I did a whois search on both domains and found that they were operated out of different states, and by different companies. However, both domains were last updated on the exact same day (Aug 17, 2004).

I examined the email. It was written with many gramatical mistakes, and the telephone number given in the email consisted of 8 digits (presumably a typo). The woman said she didn't have much computer experience and that her friend had put her picture up on a matching website. She was very attractive, but the location was "New in town...". When I did a search on this site for people within 50 miles of me, she didn't come up.

She said she moved from "Evanston". There is no Evanston in my state, but I paired the first 3 digits of the cell phone number provided with "Evanston" and found that it was a valid exchange in Illinois. Now, I didn't try calling all of the permutations of the cell phone number that was apparently fat fingered and left out the area code, but I did try two. Both were servicable, but obviously neither was her.

The email sent to me was directed at my Yahoo email account, but this account is unregistered at Big Church (I think, I didn't verify that part to my satisfaction last night).

So what did I have? It seemed to me, going to bed last night, that I had a carefully, skillfully crafted email from the matching website. They would find profiles on other dating sites, send a convincing email from an attractive member of the opposing gender, and allow you contact them only through the site. I was clearly looking at a scam here.

Fast forward to a good nights sleep and an additional check I had neglected last night. I viewed the complete headers on the email and found an originating IP address (which referred to itself as localhost.localdomain, a default configuration on Linux boxes) that was from my state!! In fact, it was from my ISP. This flew in the face of the conclusion I had drawn last night. In addition, there was another email address listed, the email address of her alledged room-mate/friend.

So I emailed the friend with a smile on my face. Now I was utterly befuddled. I laid out in vague terms how I thought that this was a scam email, and how the originating IP address conflicted with that conclusion. I hope I get a reply! I enjoyed walking back the cat.