A Test for Rental Scams

I'm looking for an apartment, and I seem to get an awful lot of e-mails from people that have beautiful apartments for low, low prices but for whatever reason they won't show me the places. Or they say they'll meet me and when I show up a confused woman answers the door and says, "No, there is no apartment for rent here."

Today I'm going to describe to you how you can check if you are being scammed. Go into your email client and turn on all of the headers (in Thunderbird, this is View->Headers->All). You'll see a giant chain of "received" headers that look like:

Received: from [216.252.122.218] by n75.bullet.mail.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP;
          22 Jul 2009 20:09:46 -0000
Received: from [67.195.9.83] by t3.bullet.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP;
          22 Jul 2009 20:09:46 -0000
Received: from [67.195.9.105] by t3.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com with NNFMP;
          22 Jul 2009 20:09:46 -0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] by omp109.mail.gq1.yahoo.com with NNFMP;
          22 Jul 2009 20:09:46 -0000

At one end of these headers will be your e-mail provider, while at the other end will be the IP address of the computer that sent the email address:

Received: from SRV502.tudelft.net ([131.180.4.18]) by ...
...
...
...
Received: from [41.205.182.125] by web111904.mail.gq1.yahoo.com via HTTP;
          Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:09:45 PDT

Sometimes the address of the originating computer is listed a bit differently:

Received: from BLU116-W26 ([65.55.116.72]) by ...
X-Originating-IP: [62.173.35.6]

The person might have masked the IP of their computer, but this is complicated and most scammers are idiots. Anyways, you can take this IP to a handy geolocation look-up service and find out the originating location.

IP: 41.205.182.125
Host: dial-pool07.ab.starcomms.net
Country: Nigeria

Every now and then the country won't be listed, but the host name you get back has information you can use to determine the country. For example, 62.173.35.6 resolves to 35-6.rv.ipnxtelecoms.com but the geolocation service doesn't give a country for this IP. ipNX Telecom has its headquarters in...Lagos, Nigeria.

I suppose in the future I'll have to screen any email about apartments. Sometimes I really hate people.

EDIT: Your email client actually uses the same method I describe above to label some emails as being probable scams. Usually IP blocks assigned to certain ISPs and sometimes even entire countries are labeled as suspect.

Some Ugly Truths about Human Trafficking

The UN's Office on Drugs and Crime released its annual Global Report on Trafficking in Persons a few weeks ago.

The Dutch fared poorly. A uniform comparison across countries is difficult since reported data varies by country. Countries provide some sub-set of people prosecuted, convicted, investigated or suspected of trafficking. A quick look through the data suggests that the Netherlands is either much better at prosecuting people, or that human trafficking is a problem for the Dutch. Conviction and prosecution rates per capita in Holland were eight times as high as the UK. The UK has roughly four times the population of the Netherlands, but the UK prosecuted and convicted less than half the number of people that Holland did.

Another interesting anomaly was the gender breakdown of convictions in Eastern Europe. In Latvia, for example, women are convicted of less than 10% of all crimes, but they account for over half of human trafficking convictions.

Anyways, the big picture is very dim. Sometimes it is easy to forget that it is 2009.

Experimental Data

We have some data that is supposed to be quadratic in nature. What does it looks like?



Great parabola to start with, but what happens? An interesting new phenomenon? Oh, nope, just a crappy cable.

Sometimes I hate you, science. Could you make pursuing you a little easier? You don't have to be such a @#*$( about random crap ruining good data, you know?