Just received an actual paper letter in the mail, complete with Tanzania postage stamp and Dar es Salaam postmark. From Charles Taylor Junior, from some refugee camp in Tanzania. Poor Dad is apparently on trail in The Hague for war crimes, but he put Junior in charge of $177 million that needs to be invested in the US, if only I would help.
I understand how sending out zillions of emails hoping for one sucker is a low-cost operation. Do these scammers really manage to steal enough money to pay for stamps & envelopes??
I know a man who got trapped by a snail mail scam in the late 80s. He eventually sent the Nigerians (or whatever) about $150,000 and still expects to get paid off. He has had ms for 40 years and according to my physician daughter-in-law, it can lead to cognitive impairment and apparently has.
But the point is, they used to do these scams through ordinary mail. I don’t know how they chose targets, but they must somehow have targeted him.
before the wide spread of email, this used to be a really common delivery method for this type of scam - my place of work would receive two or three of them a week (amongst other scam attempts such as the fake invoice, business directory subscription and the like)
I still don’t get it though. I have lived through the age of snail mail, faxes and telex machines and never saw any scam letters. (I am not saying they didn’t exist, just that I never saw them).
However, it seems to me to be different in that an email address is directed at the one person so if I was to be conned, the fake email would arrive in my in box and be for me.
With a telex or fax machine there would be one in the office, or perhaps in a branch of the firm. So the scam “letter” would arrive on a machine that could be serving any amount of people- who was it supposed to go to?