Today's scam

[dsrtao]

Let's combine the naive (college freshmen) but rich (97% or so have newish laptops) with a real issue (computer security).

Park a truck on campus in September. Offer "computer cleaning and tune-up services" with a nice large bulletin
board of services you perform. Probably ought to put up three tiers of service. Tune the prices to appeal to college students -- say, $20, $35, and $60. Make it clear that the $35 service is the one to go for.

Take the laptops, hand them a receipt, say you'll be back tomorrow, so make sure you have your receipt.

Option #1. On to the next campus, with 200 laptops to sell on ebay.

Option #2. Slap in a CD that changes the wallpaper and runs a free registry-cleaner and turns on the firewall.

Option #3. Install Linux.

Comments

Refinements

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Refinements:

• In option #1: don't collect money up front, thus triggering the "what have I got to lose?" response.
• In option #1: don't steal the laptops. Instead, have your confederate hand them over to the campus cops (still with the sticky notes that say whose is whose) and say that loser with the truck stiffed everybody and dumped the laptops. This way, people will be mad, but no individual will have lost enough to be worth coming after you. (Also, you avoid the problem where the laptop turns out to have a Lojack analogue, and your buyer tells the cops who sold it.) For extra credit: before you hand them over, copy out the hard drives (or at least critical parts of them) and sell the results to an identity-theft ring.
• In option #2: the CD should also extract identity information and install a bot and a keylogger.
• In option #2: don't mess around with taking people's laptops; just sell the CD. For extra credit, sell a big spindle of CDs to someone, offering him the franchise on campus; then it's his problem finding suckers buyers. For extra malice, only the top 3 CDs in the spindle actually have anything on them.