A Deadly Unserious 419? – Source: securityboulevard.com

Over a decade ago, I was more than a little amused at a 419 message of the “I’ve been hired to assassinate you” sub-category to which my  friend and colleague Urban Schrott, then at ESET Ireland, drew my attention, so I wrote it up in a couple of articles, one of which I won’t reference here, since the magazine in question subsequently (and shamefully) recredited it to its own staff writers. This  little article is essentially one I wrote for my own Chainmailcheck blog.

YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER:

As I sit here sipping a martini it is my regretful duty to inform you that you have been selected for assassination.

I am a professional assassin (I enclose my certificate of assassination as proof) and SMERSH have contracted me to assassinate you and have specifically paid extra for a particularly nasty death which makes it look like you died in a particularly bizarre sex game gone wrong; I had already bought the shire horse stallion (he’s called Henry – picture attached), the lard and the dragon dildo (from Bad Dragon of course, I only use the very best tools) when I found out that you are innocent of the accuse, so I make out this time to contact you. Unfortunately international crime syndicates won’t admit to mistakes and cancel the hit so I will be forced to carry out the assassination on you. Sorry about that old chap but rules are rules.

There is an option for me to help you in other for you to know who had paid SMERSH for your DEATH and don’t forget my men had been monitoring you for the past few days and daily record of your activities is been sent to me but I have refuse to order your DEATH.

Get back to me if you value your LIFE with all due speed or else I regret I will have to carry out my original contract to assassinate you and although he is quite charming for a horse I don’t think Henry is the most sensitive of lovers.

Toodle Pip!

Dai Teatime
International Assassin

Dai (a.k.a. Spike Dwaggin and possibly Nikita) wasn’t the first or last time I came across a 419-type scam message threatening to assassinate the recipient unless they paid the assassin to abort the contract, let them know who had taken out the contract, and in some way turn the tables. Perhaps it wasn’t even the most improbable 419 of this or any other type, but it was certainly one of the more amusing examples. Well, it amused ESET Ireland, and it amused me, not least because of its interesting selection of popular references.

• James Bond/SMERSH: if your acquaintanceship with James Bond is limited to the movies, you may be unaware that a fictionalized version of SMERSH (a real Russian counter-intelligence agency that was wound up in 1946) plays a significant part in the very early novels.  Oddly enough, a lot of commentary on this 419 at the time missed the fact that SMERSH and SPECTRE (a purely fictional criminal organization) are by no means the same thing, though there seems to be a certain amount of traffic from one to the other in terms of personnel. A bit like the security industry…
• The Beatles (and of course, Henry the Horse dances the waltz): I’m assuming the naming of the horse in the 419 message may well have been influenced by ‘Being for the benefit of Mr Kite’, from the Sergeant Pepper album.
• The Russian Empress Catherine the Great was said (quite untruthfully) have died as a result of a somewhat over-intimate relationship with a horse.
• (La Femme) Nikita: a film and subsequent TV series about an assassin.
• The somewhat Saintly Toodle Pip!: if your knowledge of Leslie Charteris’ The Saint is restricted to one or more TV series or maybe a movie or two, you may not be aware of the period charm of the earlier books, which were very much of their time – the very long series began in the 1920s. Of course, while Simon Templar may have inclined sometimes to the amoral, assassination wasn’t really his thing.
• I don’t suppose many people are unaware of Bertie Wooster, whether through TV or Wodehouse’s books.
• Letitia Teaspoon is,  admittedly, a somewhat more obscure creation. She got a mention by virtue of a similarity of the name Dai Teatime. And would even now be giggling girlishly in the next office, if I hadn’t invented her for a number of blog articles for ESET, Chainmailcheck and ITSecurity centred on comment spam.
• A scam-baiter forum mentioned in one of my original articles is this one, where this particular scam message is discussed at some length.
• The reference to Spike and Buffy is, of course, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, comment added to my Chainmailcheck blog informed me that Spike Dwaggin is the little dragon from the My Little Pony universe. Thanks once again to Robert, who also pointed out to me that if you convert the letters comprising ‘Dai’ to their place in the English alphabet, you get 419, and that there is an assassin in Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather called Mr. Teatime. Shamefully, I hadn’t read any Pratchett at the time, but I’ve made up for that as much as my local library has allowed since.

This is, I suppose, more amusing if you assume that no one is going to take all this seriously (surely the scammer didn’t!), but the message circulated for some time, and there is evidence that he wasn’t averse to taking money from anyone who seemed to be a potential victim, so let’s hope no real recipient fell for it. Unfortunately, it’s probable that 419 scammers really have made money from less flippant, more sinister threats from self-described assassins.

David Harley

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Check Chain Mail and Hoaxes authored by David Harley. Read the original post at: https://chainmailcheck.wordpress.com/2025/02/15/a-deadly-unserious-419/