A Tough Time for Nigerian Scammers
I'm sure that most people reading this post have at some point received scam spam emails, TYPED IN ALL CAPS, from (unscrupulous) "businessmen" in Nigeria offering incredibly lucrative business deals. Typically they either claim that you've inherited vast sums of money from a deceased "relative" or they claim to be related to some deposed politician who needs YOUR help to move ungodly sums of money around, making you rich in the process.
I receive several of these a week, and in times past have actually written them back pretending to be interested in what they typically refer to as a "DEAL/TRANSACTION" (all caps, of course). I've even impersonated a nun, a Gregorian monk and a Thugee assassin in these exchanges and actually had one scammer believing I had actually flown to Lagos, Nigeria to seal the deal. (I had this guy in a panic; it's amazing how easy it is to fool someone with details about a place you've never been before after a little googling around.)
By way of a little disclaimer, I can't claim to be the first person to scam these scammers since others have been doing it for a lot longer (obsessively, even) and much, much more creatively. Heck, it's even considered a sport in some parts of Webdom.
At any rate, a modicum of justice has just been served over in fair Nigeria: as part of a crackdown a court has handed out a 2 1/2 year sentence to the country's most notorious scammer, a woman who, with two other accomplices, defrauded a Brazilian bank of $242 million. (Hmm, I wonder if she was one of my, uh, pen pals?) More sentences for other email fraud cases are on the way.
Useless Trivia Dept.: Would you know, email scamming ranks fourth in Nigeria's foreign exchange after oil, natural gas and cocoa? That's a true fact, supposedly. Well, maybe.
I receive several of these a week, and in times past have actually written them back pretending to be interested in what they typically refer to as a "DEAL/TRANSACTION" (all caps, of course). I've even impersonated a nun, a Gregorian monk and a Thugee assassin in these exchanges and actually had one scammer believing I had actually flown to Lagos, Nigeria to seal the deal. (I had this guy in a panic; it's amazing how easy it is to fool someone with details about a place you've never been before after a little googling around.)
By way of a little disclaimer, I can't claim to be the first person to scam these scammers since others have been doing it for a lot longer (obsessively, even) and much, much more creatively. Heck, it's even considered a sport in some parts of Webdom.
At any rate, a modicum of justice has just been served over in fair Nigeria: as part of a crackdown a court has handed out a 2 1/2 year sentence to the country's most notorious scammer, a woman who, with two other accomplices, defrauded a Brazilian bank of $242 million. (Hmm, I wonder if she was one of my, uh, pen pals?) More sentences for other email fraud cases are on the way.
Useless Trivia Dept.: Would you know, email scamming ranks fourth in Nigeria's foreign exchange after oil, natural gas and cocoa? That's a true fact, supposedly. Well, maybe.
posted by The Squeaky Pig at 10:31 PM
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