Hello mein Scammer

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
@

 @grahamcluley.com
 / grahamcluley

We’ve discussed before the threat of emails from pretty girls looking for love on the internet.

If you make the mistake of responding to unsolicited declarations of love online you may be telling a spammer that your email address is active. But what’s worse – it can lead to a confidence trick that sees the victim building up a bogus “relationship” with their new electronic acquaintance and ultimately handing over money or personal information, perhaps to pay for an air ticket.

Today I wanted to highlight that this is not just an English language phenomenon. We have, for instance, seen today a scam email spammed out in German.

German language email scam

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The email claims that the sender is from a 28-year-old woman called Maria who, although currently based in Canada, hails from Kazakhstan. She explains that her parents died in an airplane crash, and that she wants to settle down in Germany, and will send photographs if the recipient replies.

The sad truth is that there are people out there who fall for scams like this, and clearly the scammers think it is worth their while translating their confidence tricks into a variety of different languages.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and hosts the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Mastodon, or drop him an email.

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