[QUOTE=Nava]
The Spanish isn’t too bad if the reader doesn’t speak Spanish… there isn’t a single sentence that sounds like it was written by someone who actually speaks the language.
[/QUOTE]
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.