Yes, you are quite right. I should have looked at it more closely. It is in fact much worse than a typical attorney letter in English. (However, the person does appear to have more than a “babelfish” level of Spanish, since they use a variety of verb tenses, and the letter is understandable.) In this case the mistakes seem to be due to an imperfect level of knowledge of the language, rather than deliberate errors. Looking at the kind of errors made, I would guess that the writer is probably an English speaker (like a Nigerian), rather than someone who speaks any Romance language (like an Ivorian, as they alledge themselves to be).
When the Nigerian scam began to take off in the early 1990s, most of the letters, which at that time were almost entirely “attorney” type letters, were badly written. Now many of the attorney letters are quite good, and at least as good as one might get from an authentic official source in Africa. Since they just seem to be starting to target Latin America, perhaps such letters will improve with time.
The interesting thing about this letter is that the writer has no reason to expect that I might speak Spanish from my e-mail address alone. Likewise, the writers of letters in French have no reason to suppose I speak French. I probably get letters in French because my e-mail address was obtained when I worked in Gabon, and get letters in Spanish because my e-mail was harvested from some source in Latin America.
I was disturbed to get a scam email sent to my lobeliaoverhill@ email addy which addressed be my my full real name inside… claiming to be from someone representing my Uncle Phillip who’d died in South America leaving me a diamond mine in his Will. I might have fallen for it if I’d actually had an Uncle Phillip.
I’ve never seen or heard of that particular scam again, and if I ever find out I did have an Uncle Phillip I shall explode.
Oh and BTW the Nigerian scam has been around pre-internet ad TV show on the BBC did a feature on letters from Nigeria offering to offload millions of dollars from a dead persons Bank account into your Bank account 20+ years ago…
Do you actually know of any case of this happening? It’s theoretically possible, but the vast majority of people running these scams are in fact from Nigeria or elsewhere in the developing world. Given the notoriety of the scheme at this point, I would think most Americans smart enough to run a scam would pick one of the many other varieties.
It’s possibly due to the fact that Nigeria had a kleptocratic military regime for so long, coupled with the fact that the oil wealth provided a lot of circulating money to steal, as well as allowing for considerable sophistication in some sectors. Among the various ethnic groups though, the Ibos are the most notorious for being wheeler-dealers.
I visited Nigeria in 1993 to attend a conference in Enugu. Scamming at every turn was relentless. I was met as I got off the plane in Lagos by a “minder” arranged by the conference organizers. He whisked me off to the VIP lounge, then returned periodlcally to ask me for another $10 or so to bribe one official or another before finally getting my passport stamped and luggage through customs. He then arranged a taxi to my hotel for what I later found out was five times the going rate. I’m sure he and the taxi driver split the difference.
Due to some crossed wires, my minder didn’t show up at my hotel the next morning to arrange my transfer to Enugu. I finally went to the local airport by myself to try to catch a flight. I ended up paying more in “tips” and bribes than I did for the plane ticket itself.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a “pidgin.” Their English is actually often quite good, though it does have some “African” regionalisms or turns of phrase that can be give-aways.
Given the diversity of languages in West Africa, almost everyone there is at least bilingual if not multilingual. If they are from one of the minor ethnic groups, they will speak their own birth language, plus a major regional language (Iba, Yoruba, Fang), plus one or more of the European official languages (English or French). So it’s not surprising that they will try to pick up other languages.
Before I got extremely aggressive with my spam filtering, I used to look at the originating IP of most 419 letters I reveived.
Most of the IPs belonged to European, Israeli and Middle Eastern satellite ISPs, where Nigerian cybercafes generally get their Internet access from. Those remaining were from Nigeria, with a few from other west African nations. No US IPs whatsoever. None.
Here’s a new twist, at least for me, a 419 scam supposedly sent by a woman, “Miss. Lisa Doudou.” It was sent to an email addr harvested from the Canary Wireless Forum.