We have a new winner: This week’s Moron of the Week is here!
The latest idiot to get caught up in a Nigerian Bank Fraud scam is this long time county treasurer. Not only did he sink his whole life savings into this, he also dropped $1.25 million in public funds there, too.
If this were a few years ago, I might be able to find some sympathy for him. I’d not heard of the Nigerian scam until the mid-nineties, myself.
But that’s ten, maybe fifteen years ago. Since then, anyone not approaching senility should know the basics of the Nigerian scam, how it works, and what it will eventually get the mark. A fifty-six year old man, presumably educated, and aware of the world around him, should know better.
And that’s completely ignoring the folk wisdom: If something’s too good to be true, it often is.
I hope they raise a huge stink about this. I have no sympathy for this man, and look forward to hearing more of his idiocies.
I just had to chime in to say that for the past few weeks, a significant amount of my time has been spent inactivating metric assloads of internet accounts that were (fraudulently) created for no other reason but to spew out these 419 scam spams like pestilent puss.
May they all burn in Hell for eternity with Satan’s scrotum as a permanent pacifier.
So, even if we can give him the benefit of the doubt for not having heard of this type of scam before, the bank people actually warned him he might be in trouble. You’d think that would at least cause him to make some inquiries. Who knows, there might even be a technology that allows you to search for this sort of information, maybe through a network of connected machines.
My Dad used to quote the aphorism, “You can’t cheat an honest man.”* Even totally clueless people with no understanding of the internet and no personal knowledge of the Nigerian Scam should recognize that the basic request in the letter is fundamentally dishonest and that they should avoid participating for ethical reasons.
(It’s an aphorism, not a solid gold Absolute Truth. Obviously, a person who was caught by a phishing expedition using a letter from their “own” bank’s security department with a masked hyperlink has not demonstrated any dishonesty.)
I used to work at a large urban public library and was one of the people who had to supervise the knucklewalkers who used the public computers. (library computers are flypaper for assholes)
Had this guy who was trying to print something out. He would not listen to my explanation of how the process worked. Kept arguing with me about it and getting ruder and ruder and ruder till I finally told him that he’d have to listen to what I was telling him or he’d never in a million years get his Oh So Important document to print.
And then I couldn’t get him to sit still and listen to the steps involved. He’d click something and get up and run to the printer and I’d have to call him back to do the next step. And again. And again.
Finally, the print job went through, and he got up and ran… and I got a chance to see what the document was.
Ah yes. A nice long email from a nice rich guy in Nigeria who so wanted this jackass for a friend.
I’m not sure. I mean, the fact that he was convicted of a misdemeanor doesn’t indicate anything to me about his probity. Many traffic infractions are misdemeanors, for example. The article implies it was a misdemeanor related to his bookkeeping work, but doesn’t actually say it had anything to do with his professional work.
