See Police hunting fraudster claiming to be with United Nations.
Gee - I wonder why this reminds me so much of a Nigerian 419 scam, except this one is in person?
I’m not surprised.
They had a good run while it lasted with the Email campaign. This has simply confirmed for them the fact that there’s no shortage of suckers out there.
They’re just adjusting their business plan now that the online version is winding down.
There was a news item here not more than about 3 or 4 months ago about a guy who was taken in via this same email scam and was relieved of about 100k! The scam was widely known by then, and the victim was by no means a newbie to the Internet.
As is and has always been the case, the prospect of gaining something for nothing will never fail to seduce those who are unable or unwilling to consider the possibility that someone is determined to rip them off.
The Nigerian scam goes back before the time of E-mail (or at least before E-mail became common). It was a scam using letters (and later fax and Telex) before it migrated to the Internet:
Furthermore, it’s merely a variation on an older scam called The Spanish Prisoner:
Also, note that in the article it says that the store owner did not send anything to Africa. He collected money and baggage to give to the scammer, but he decided during the second meeting that the deal was suspicious. When he backed out of the deal, a second scammer burst into the store and stole the owner’s money. So while this scam started like a Nigerian scam, it ended like an ordinary armed robbery.
This is slightly off-topic, but might be of some interest. Selling something to the United Nations, even when they really want it, is surprisingly difficult.
Someone at the UN called us wanting to buy one license of our software (under $50). When I asked him for his method of payment, he seemed baffled. “Can’t you just send it to me? We have this whole process for buying stuff but I need it now.” Yeah, not so much. I know we can sell on terms but I’m not set up to do that – he just called the regular customer service number.
Anyway, so I talk to these people like five or six times because he didn’t actually want to get set up for terms, which involves sending us a purchase order and so on, he just wanted me to give him the product. Most of the others basically wanted the same thing. One person literally laughed when I asked if they had a credit card so we could do the order just to get this over with – “Hahahaha, we don’t do that here!” Uh, whatever – I’ve taken orders from many US government and military agencies, huge universities, all kinds of industry, and in general they have access to credit cards.
Finally they sent us enough information so we could sell to them on terms (they send us a check within 30 days). After we sent them the product, now they want to wire the money. Okay, we can get set up for that, but we need to add a wire transfer fee to the total. Of course, they want us to just eat that. No, we’re not going to do that (it’s like $35!). We call them, they call us, over and over again, trying to get the money. This goes back and forth over and over again over months. Finally, six months after the purchase, they finally get approval to pay the wire transfer fee from whoever they needed to at the UN and we get our money.
Yeah, I’m not allowed to offer the UN terms any more.
The moral of the story is that this scam doesn’t seem so outlandish to me after actually having dealt with these morons. It would not surprise me at all if someone from the UN legitimately asked a business for a bunch of product and cash up front. I wouldn’t agree to it, of course.