Punk'd by Brian and Michael

Hello and welcome to Punk'd by Brian and Michael. My name is Michael and I work with Brian at an engineering firm. We used to work in the IT department which helped us facilitate some of our gags. We've often found it necessary to punk one of our co-workers to break the monotony of work. I've owned this domain for many years and have never really done anything with it so we decided to post up for everyone how we've punk'd some people over the years. We hope you enjoy the read.

Ms. Gullible Punk'd

What follows is an email sent to another co-worker that explains the background to the punk.

Sam,

Below is the joke that Michael and I played on Tara last week. This is going to be a very long read but it was fun as hell to do and sorry you missed it.

Last Wednesday Larry came into our office to tell us that IT was up in Tara’s office helping her with her personal computer that she brought from home. He said that Tuesday night a Microsoft looking software popped up on her screen telling her that her computer was infected with a virus. It then proceeded to tell her to click on the link provided to have a piece of software installed that would remove the virus. After she did that it then told her that it would cost money for the virus to be removed and provided a place for her to enter her credit card. After she enters her credit card she noticed at the bottom of the page that the phrase “All Rights Reserved” was misspelled. Only now did she realize that she had been scammed. She then proceeded to call her credit card company and shut down the computer until she could bring it to work the next day for Peter to fix.

After hearing this story from Larry I figured it was my duty to come up with something that would embarrass her even more than she probably felt at that point in time. I decided to create my own scam to send to her but wanted to try and make it so unbelievable that she would know right away that it was fake email. I guess I should have tried harder. Below is the Nigerian email scam that I created and with the help of Michael sent it to her from a completely made up email address. I BCC'd in the email Larry, Sherry, and Angie.

First email sent to the victim

At this point in time I had only told Angie about the email because I wanted someone on the inside to let me know what was going on. Larry went up to talk to her about the strange email he got involving her but she was already freaked out about it because of the information involved and that Sherry had already talked to her about getting the email. At this point in time Tara is convinced that the virus from her personal computer was now following her to work and was getting her work contacts and sending this email to them. She calls IT to tell them about it and to try and get help in getting rid of it (although I did not find out about IT until the next day.) So after a good laugh and being somewhat disappointed in her for believing that email to be real I decided to create a follow up email.

Before I sent it I decided to go talk to IT to make sure they are not trying to track down this email. They told me that Tara had called them about the email but they didn’t know what to think about it. After I told them it was Michael and I they got a good laughed and said they would play along with the follow up email.

Now the challenge was to come up with something so over the top that she would have no choice but to realize that it was a joke. Below is the follow up email that I sent to her.

Second email sent to the victim