Dodgy website targets US God Squad

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS have become a signifigantly extensive demographic throughout many US suburbs, small towns and rural areas. So it's not all too surprising that they're being targeted by a dubious-looking service which promises to send final emails to their friends and family Left Behind when they're whisked up to heaven in the Rapture at Armageddon.

The website upstart YouveBeenLeftBehind.com offers the multitudes of fanatical End Times believers means to send emails to up to 62 other people, six days after the Rapture, at the price of $40 per year.

That's when the fundamentalist faithful believe that they'll be swept up into eternal bliss by Jesus while everyone else suffers through seven bad years of tribulations under the Antichrist before finally being annihilated at world's end.

The website, which claims that it's run "By Christians, For Christians", says "You've Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends for Christ."

One might wonder what good that might possibly do. If by then the Rapture has already happened, presumably it will already be too late for email recipients to convert so as to make it on the heavenly bus at the last moment, as it were.

It does hold out hope that a second chance at last minute conversion might work, but then it suggests that believers might leave family and friends " access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorney."

The site offers its subscribers among the Select the ability to store up to 250MB of documents, up to 150MB of which can be encrypted by an unspecified algorithm, explicitly for post-Rapture use of those unfortunate sinners Left Behind.

It makes the argument that those who are Raptured won't be needing their valuables anymore then, anyway. The site says its customers can designate up to 12 non-believers to receive their encrypted documents following the Rapture.

Subscribers' stored emails will be sent, and their documents released, when at least three of the website's complement of five fundamentalist Christian staff "scattered throughout the US" fail to login for six days in a row.

However, as Wired notes, the website is registered through an anonymous proxy registrar and none of the principals or staff are identified by name. Further, there's no real-world location, mailing address or even email contact information associated with the website.

Yeah, that's certainly the profile of a fine organisation that everyone should willingly entrust with their most sensitive financial information and other valuables.

It looks to us a lot like this might be an elaborate phishing scam. Sadly, given its targeted audience, it might work. µ

See Also
The dead are speaking
Upset your loved ones after you're dead

L'Inq
Wired