I hate spam, but I really hate the pathetic emails like this. I found this in my email today:
I only opened it because it was titled “How are you and your family?” and I could see the name SGT Arthur Smith. I don’t know anyone of that name, but at first I was thinking “Is this someone I may have met or been stationed with and have forgotten?”.
Its bogus of course. No Sergeant First Class would write their own rank as SGT (1st Class), they’d just put SFC. No soldier that actually knows me would propose such a thing anyway, since they would know I’d report it in a heartbeat.
But I’m sure somewhere theres some drooling idiot falling for it. Actually, I think I hate the people that fall for it as much as the spammers.
I delete them about once a month. I am somehow the only person on earth that they can contact by email. That is too dumb to deal with. Sometimes they are rich people who are trapped in their fancy home with no way out. I guess rich people can not operate phones or afford he
They prey on the greed of some people who see a chance to get money, where none exists.
The source can’t be traced in a productive way. If anybody did cooperate and lose money, there would be no hope of recovery, only the risk of exposure for being so stupid. I receive these very rarely any more. I suppose the junk filters are catching them. Blanketing email addresses is so cheap that a tiny number of hits is still productive I assume. What gets me is the absurdity of the amounts involved. It’s never $432,566 for example. It’s more like $400 million. If you are telling a whopper, why not tell a bigger one I suppose. I responded to a few in humorous ways until I was bored.
Most of them are caught by my spam filter, but a few still get through. Having traveled in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, my e-mail address is floating around in the Heart of Spamness. I think I have seen every imaginable variant; I get them in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and even in what I think is Norwegian. I got one in Chinese once.
The names have become increasingly outlandish. I have recent ones from Flora Dumbo, Blessed Lama, and Tit Cheriff.
Here’s a recent one like that in the OP:
Sometimes, though, I think they’re hardly trying anymore. I got this one with the note “Plz urgent respond.”
I either have an incredibly good spam filter on my primary account or for some reason none of these spammers think I’m likely to fall for their schemes because I can’t remember the last time I’m gotten anything remotely resembling a nigerian scam.
I get them every now and then & rarely bother reading them, but what I don’t understand- why always Nigeria?? Is that the only place there are stupid, dishonest people??
I don’t think it’s always Nigeria they probably get blamed for a lot of other people’s scams by default.
That said though, I once spent a year assessing Visa applications and learnt to loath the place. They were one of the major sources of applications that we dealt with, and out of dozens of cases I saw I think I had one application that didn’t have something seriously and obviously wrong with it.
It’s always sad when something like this starts going around. It’s sad that the scammers are taking advantage of people who might want to help someone as noble as a soldier. It’s sad that they are passing themselves off as soldiers.
It’s sad that the scammers have so little other options that they have to do this…
Viewed in another light, these email entreaties can be considered a new art form. I give the “Nigerian Scam Spam Contest”. Courtesy of the Drabblecast.
The challenge is, of course, proper use of improper grammer.
A sample…
"Kind Sir:
My name is Abemolela Kwangatusi. I am the attorney representing certain persons of alien natures who recently applied for domiciles in Nigeria. They were informed that in orders to settles in our countrys they must settles all claims against them worldswide.
They have herewith furnished us with comprehensive lists of all persons who were abducted and anally probed during the many years of their explorations…"
But the thing is, the e-mails still work. Last week at the local Publix, my wife overheard the guy at the Customer Service desk trying to dissuade a woman from wiring money for a Nigerian scam. The woman kept saying, “But this one is real!” They guy had no choice but to send her $300 for “adminstrative purposes.”
He was the one who inspired my brief foray into scambaiting.
(I wasn’t very good at it, although at one point I got one trying to sell me a unicorn).
PapSett- It’s not just Nigeria. That whole area of West Africa is 419 City. Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Togo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast… dirt-poor people, ubiquitous corruption, and there’s plenty of ogas (bosses) out recruiting. Nigeria is probably the biggest, yes.
Other scam centers are Eastern Europe and the Philippines, though those mostly are love scams. Even the West African countries sometimes have their own signature scams- the Ivory Coast has assassinated cocoa magnates, Nigeria (IIRC) has pet scammers, and Senegal has poorly-written love scams (sometimes combined with the refugee princess scam). There are also large communities of West African immigrants in Spain and Holland.
We get a variation scam along with the regular ones. It’s almost always from someone who claims to be a member of the clergy, and they want to buy all of a certain type of merchandise that we sell, usually for an orphanage somewhere in Africa. They will arrange pickup of the merchandise from our warehouse, and can they pay by credit card? (My company offers free shipping in the continental US for a minimum purchase. What these people want to buy would easily reach that amount. Why would you pay freight charges on something when you didn’t have to?) And as always, God will bless us.