This showed up in my spam mailbox.
Apparently my money is coming out of Nairobi, since that is where One World Courier (a real company) is located, and it’s been oked by the US Treasury Department, Homeland Security, the IMF and the FBI.
See you all later, I’ll be hanging out on the beach for a while.
Some people have ALL of the good luck.
Lucky son of a gun.
Maybe in gratitude you could slip One World Couriers 20 bucks so they can buy a domain name and don’t have to use a yahoo.com email address.
I noted with some amusement that messages like these in my spam box have an icon of a fish hook to alert the recipient that it is a phishing notice.
One of them closes with:
"I wait to hear from you urgently if you are still alive and I will appreciate if we can keep this deal confidential. "
Dead men tell no tales. :dubious:
Wow, I wish I was poor enough to qualify for this Two Million United States Dollars gift.
Hey, I know. If I gave away the money I have now, I’d be poor. Write back to them and ask them if this is okay. And ask if should send the money to them, so they can verify I gave it away.
what if they are dishonest ? I think it’s possible.
new and reputable
How’s that work?
Maybe if they had said “…you are assured this is neither a scam nor any act of Money Laundering…”, but they specifically said “…you are completely assured this is neither a scam nor any act of Money Laundering…”. Under International United Nations Business Law (capitalized to show legitimacy), using the word “completely” in a sentence requires the entire sentence be true.
Or:
United Nations Poverty Alleviation Program. UNPAP. You’ve been PAP smeared in reverse, my fellow citizen. And apparently, it Tastes of Chocolate.
Good idea, they will believe that you are too poor to have a PC or smart phone!
I want to help! I will PM my Pay Pal info to you.
Could you spare a measly twenty? With all the millions you will be getting, you’ll never miss it. And speaking of money laundering, it would help with my laundry. My shorts are getting kinda funky.
Why is Briefcase capitalized?
You looking for a new life partner? I am willing to divorce and come to your house. As long as the house is near the beach and you have servants. Let me know when the money comes.
ETA chocolate is my life.
Out of curiosity, since I’ve never followed up on such scammers before, what happens if you play along? Do they require you to wire money to a certain account, and what does the email address send you as a reply when you message them as instructed?
Just to note: The various errors in these 419 spams are there deliberately. I don’t know how they work, but they just do. Suckers seem to believe ones with errors more than the ones without.
I’ve heard the errors are to make sure the people who respond are really dumb, because a victim that wises up in the middle is a big waste of time.
What you don’t yet know is that the key to the Briefcase is held by a security company and it’ll cost you $5,000 to get the key released.
As Malleus noted, it’s not that the suckers find error-filled emails more convincing than well written ones. It’s that the scammers want to target the people who are such suckers that they’ll believe something even when it’s filled with errors.
Because at some point, they’re going to be asking those people to send large sums of money to an unverified overseas address. That’s the kind of thing that might awaken the suspicions even of people who are pretty stupid. So you need to separate the incredibly stupid people from the pretty stupid people.