Apparantly, a guy called Amir scammed a random student on £375, giving the random student a broken laptop 2 months later. The random student (alias laptopguy) manages to recover data from the hard-drive of the broken computer, and posts the findings on a blog. The blog spread like wildfire on the net, the scammer got owned, everybody is happy. Click here for link to blog

I see three possibilities:
1. It is all true. The student got scammed, got pissed and did a blog. The scammer got what he deserved.
2. The laptop was stolen, the sensitive information obtained was beloning to the victim of the theft, who now is faced with a lose-lose situation.
3. The blog itself is a scam. Why didn’t the student contact police, contact bank/paypal/other-pay-service for the address of the scammer. The pictures, the porn pictures all had different links. The picture of the passport is edited with Microsoft Paint, as with the pictures above, which was supposed to be the work of Amir. The work done in Paint have the same styles. Several days after he posted the blog he decided to not to update it. Suddenly a guy from nowhere takes it over at another webaddress (May 29), who joined on May. laptopguy also joined on May. It seems he just posted it all on one go, meaning he must know blogger.com quite well, perhaps indicating he already runs another blog there. Lastly, he links to ANOTHER blog started the same day as the other (May 29), the author also joined blogger.com in May. All three blog authors joined the same month, made their post the same month (2/3 on the same day even!), their blogger profiles all look similar, hastily made without much information. Lastly (again, I know, lame) you could see angry supposedly posted by Amir under different nicknames in the comments section of the blog, and later you see that laptopguy has received an angry call from Amir’s uncle. This last part might be laptopguy trying to ensure us that possibility 1 is true.

There is no proof that possibility 3 is true, just a lot of information, when pieced together, might give an indication of what is really going on. The arguments for possibility 3 is the result of some quick reasoning, if given the time I might provide you with better ones.

Why would anyone pretend to be scammed on the net? Publicity must be it, brilliant idea by the way. I would have done it if given the time, if only I had thought of it. I can imagine the day laptopguy says that he is Amir, everyone would know him for the genious prank he pulled on the entire internet. He would be a internet-celebrity, the next Maddox.

So before the internet population (and the media) gets too hyped, draw conclusions too quickly, eat pizzas too fast… wait. See what happens. You wouldn’t want to laugh at an idiot getting owned by his own scam, make sure your not the one being scammed.

Written quickly, will check spelling and logic lateeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrr.