E-mail from "BYOND Admin's"

ID:182129
 
Dec 12 2008, 4:46 am
Ok....I got an E-mail from Byond stating that...

"

Dear [email protected], Matt3151

Your game called ''Naruto The Final Battle'' has been (together with 14 others) nominated for the by users thought of title ''Most Deripped''.
Basicly meaning that your game has been changed from a ''rip'', to a legit game (if not, almost).
However, we wish for all the nominated to send us their coding and computer graphics, otherwise known as sprites or icons. We ask this because our Complaints database has many topics of the feared ''Src extractor'', and we wish to check on wether you have used this program or not.
Those who have used it, shall be eliminated from the competition immediately. We hope you understand.

Now, offcourse we wouldn't let the top three winners go without giving you some swag now would we!

First price: 6 months using one of our personally maintained 24/7 shell server to host your game, and a 3 month BYOND membership!

Second price: 4 month using one of our personally maintained 24/7 shell server to host your game!

Third price: 2 months using one of our personally maintained 24/7 shell server to host your game!

Be sure to submit your source code, along with your key name, and hub link before the 26th of December!
Season greetings and wishing you a New Year filled with happiness, success,health and prosperity!

Kind regards, BYOND's administators.

"

I started to rehost my Game about 3 Days ago, and it IS based of the source code of Naruto Izou (Call it a rip if you want, you know nothing until you log on ;D)
Anyways, point being, should I trust this E-mail or not?

The E-mail it was sent from is [email protected]
Dec 12 2008, 4:57 am
It is fake the email is not even from byond.com. Anyone can create a live email account.
Dec 12 2008, 5:01 am
In response to Soldierman
Yeah, I guessed that :P
Thank you for the word tho ^^
Dec 12 2008, 5:06 am
It's safe to say the staff would only ever ask for your game's source if it is related to a BYOND bug (and this would probably only be if your game is insanely small and a snippet demonstrating the bug is your source). Plus, they said "Src extractor". First of all, it's RSC. Second of all, they only capitalized the S. Not to mention the countless other spelling errors, such as "Offcourse" and "wether".
Dec 12 2008, 5:18 am
In response to Jeff8500
XD I think when they said Src, they ment Src, when the RSC Extracter was send out, the creator (Left Nameless) said that if you spread it in an E-mail 10 times, he would send you a Src Extracter aswell... and I saw those spelling errors aswell o.o Thanks for the help!
Dec 12 2008, 5:20 am
In response to Matt3151
The only DMB extractors at the moment are in the hands of Hobnob and (I think) the BYOND staff. Darkwizard's "DMB extractor" is nothing but a simple skin that outputs a few messages; it's a scam.
Dec 12 2008, 7:06 am
There are several obvious reasons this is a scam:

1) The email did not come from byond.com, but from [email protected]. BYOND is not based out of the Netherlands, and any email from BYOND would come from byond.com or dantom.com.

2) Whoever wrote the email can't spell or use English grammar for crap. Seriously, "offcourse"? "First price"? "One of our... shell server" (notice it's not plural)? There are a few legitimate BYOND Staff members with minor spelling difficulties, but this is a complete fail.

3) BYOND doesn't offer shell servers for hosting. There's no mention of that anywhere on the site, so why would we offer several months of a free service that we don't even offer as a pay service?

4) Since we don't police rips, neither would we be hosting a contest to award games that changed from rips to legitimate games.

5) There is no mention of any such contest anywhere at all on the BYOND website.

6) There is no such thing as a "src extractor"; there are resource extractors, and a couple of people have made decompilers which they have not distributed.

I'm not sure where the scammer got your email address, but it's quite clear that the email did not come from us. You should report the email as a phishing/fraud attempt to the live.nl domain.

Lummox JR
Dec 12 2008, 9:16 am
I've give these guys credit, they did put a little thought into a cover story, even if they did a very poor job of executing it.

As others have stated, this is a fake. The BYOND Staff would never ask for your code or resources unless it is in reference to a bug report you filed to begin with, and even then they would probably ask for a specific icon or specific snippet of code causing the bug.

Is it possible for you to get the original header information of the email? It is pretty common for email services, even web based ones, to include the true originating IP. I'm not sure if Live does this, but if you could get that information, it would be helpful. If you can get a full header, and it appears to have a real, non-Live IP as the originating IP, please submit it using the Support Form. There is a good chance this wont lead anywhere, but giving the staff as much information as possible is a good thing.

Good job, however, on not only paying enough attention to be suspicious, but also asking about it where the staff can see, because they need to know if things like this are going to be a problem in the future.
Dec 12 2008, 3:49 pm
In response to Danial.Beta
Danial.Beta wrote:
Is it possible for you to get the original header information of the email? It is pretty common for email services, even web based ones, to include the true originating IP.

Last I checked, none of these services add their own header. However if you receive an e-mail from a @byond.com address you want to verify, you can use the headers to obtain the IP address of the mail server -- which should be BYOND's own IP.
Dec 14 2008, 5:50 am
I lol'd quite hard.