Am I Crazy, or Is This a Great Idea for a Scam?

I was playing poker at Full Tilt Poker tonight when across the chat board comes an official-looking message saying that an employee of Full Tilt was arrested for stealing $200,000. The message says for full information go to http://www.fulltilt-cnn.com. (Don’t go clicking on things there until you read further!)

The URL seemed fishy. So I went to Google News and searched for news of the arrest. Nothing. So I went to this fulltilt-cnn.com web page. It looks a whole lot like the cnn.com web page, but this must be a scam. I haven’t worked up the courage to click on the video links. I suspect something very evil lurks behind them.

Maybe somebody who knows something about these sorts of things can check it out? Steve Peisner, are you out there?

I have to hand it to the con men, if that is what is going on here. Great idea to make a bunch of people with lots of cash in their poker accounts think that the accounts have been compromised, leading them to divulge their passwords.

Luckily, the execution (as is so often the case with scams) doesn’t measure up to the idea.