Before I write a daily post
I want to urge you to
scroll down to near the
bottom of this page and
click on my first posting.
Many of my daily postings
are in sequence and won't
make much sense unless
they are read in the order
they were written. Click
on and read the first one I
wrote on September 30th, 2007 then the next and
the next.
Today I want to write a cautionary note about
email scams out of Africa. No doubt many, if
not all of you, have received emails from someone
with an English sounding name, promising you
a large sum of money with no input on your part
other than agreeing to receive a large sum of
money from their source and put it into your
bank account.
From here the scam varies. In some instances
they want you to keep anywhere from 10%,
25 or 30%, even in some cases 50% and then
return the remainder to them in the form of
a money order. This person supposedly
represents a good sized firm in England and
sell products in the United States and Canada.
The problem is, the customer supposedly has
trouble getting payments to the seller. So
you are to act as a collector for them. When
you receive a check from a customer, in an
amount large enough to make the effort on
their part worth while. It may be in the form
of a cashier's check or a business check.
Either way, it will look completely genuine.
You deposit the check and then buy a money
order for the seller in the percentage you are
to return to them, keeping the remainder for
yourself. Sounds like a great deal, doesn't it?
The problem is, the check is no good. A few
weeks later you get a notice from your bank
the check has bounced for one reason or
another and you owe the bank the full amount
of the check.
Another favorite again has certain variations.
You are promised a quite large amount of
money, anywhere from $850,000 to 1 1/2 to
2 or 3 million dollars for some effort you made
for that person in the past. They have come
into a large amount of money and want to use
part of it to repay people who have helped them
in the past. The money is to be paid to you in'
any of several different ways. One way is, you
get a notice a courier is on his way to the United
States with a package holding the money
promised to you. Or a courier service is being
lined up but the person making the arrangements
finds out he needs an additional $750, $2000,
$4 or 5 thousand dollars to pay the courier.
Otherwise the payment cannot be delivered to
you. Of course, if you have been hooked strongly
enough to be convinced you are going to lose all
that money unless you come through with the
money requested from you, you just might fall for
the scam. The problem is, once you have sent the
money, you will never hear from the benevolent
person again.
Another twist is, you suddenly get a phone call
from an individual who can barely speak English,
telling you he is a courier from some courier company
in Africa. He is carrying a sealed package he was to
deliver to you. He has been stopped and is being
held by the Home Security people in, say, Texas.
He needs $7500 to get himself and the package free
from the Home Security people. He is desperate
and wants to get his package delivered to you but
the only way he can find out that he can do that is
to come up with $7500.00 and to please rush that
amount to him. You are puzzled by the fact that,
as he is talking to you on the phone, there is the same
amount of delay in the conversation as there was
with the person who called from Africa to prepare
you for the wonderful gift of money.
A slightly different twist to the approach is to ask
you to help get his money out of some country in
the country he is living in as his government is
making plans to confiscate the entire amount,
usually anywhere from 10 million to 25 million
dollars. He wants to transfer the entire amount
into your bank account, then he wants you to
keep half for yourself and be his investor for the
other half. Sounds reasonable, huh? A great
deal for you. Not much work or effort on your
part for perhaps 5, 10 or more million dollars?
Everything is going very smoothly and you are
only a few days from the money being electronically
deposited in your checking account. The time is
getting closer and closer and he tells you there is
no hitch. Just as you are getting your hopes and
dreams up, he sadly sends you a message saying
there has been a last minute hitch. The bank
officials in his bank are requiring a payment of
$5000, $7500 or some other quite large figure
in order to complete the transaction. If they are
not paid with a very short period of time, they
have the authority to confiscate the entire amount.
Your beneficiary has included all his available
moneys in the effort and is unable to raise the
money himself. He desperately needs your help
and so please send him the entire amount needed
within 24 or 48 hours. Otherwise you both are
going to lose it all. If you are enough of a sucker
to send it to him, that will be the last you will ever
hear from him.
There are several other variations to these schemes.
They have several things in common. Although you
are supposed to believe, at the beginning, you are
dealing with a completely honest, christian person
usually an Englishman living in Africa. Actually almost of these schemes are coming out of Nigeria.
Nigeria is known among law enforcement people as
the scam capital of the world.
The second common theme is, you will be able to
get a large amount of money with no risk and very
little effort on your part.
The third most common thing is, at some point, you
will be asked to send a significant amount of money
to them to overcome some obstacle which is preventing
both of you from reaping the rewards for your small
effort.
In each case you will be hounded with desperate
phone calls and emails pleading with you to send the
money to save the project.
How do I know all this. Out of curiosity I responded
to a couple of these offers of wealth. I saw a pattern
between the two, and so decided to respond to others
to see just how far they would progress before there
was any mention of sending money to them. I perhaps
responded to six or eight with the results I mentioned
above. I even (with tongue in cheek, agreed to be a
go between between English, Chinese, Japanese, etc
companies and customers in the United States and
Canada. I even received a large check from two
different customers for two companies. In one
case, it was a beautiful cashier's check. In another
a bank check. In each case, just to make certain they
were not legitimate, I typed in the bank name shown
on the checks into the Google search engine. I was
able to obtain a telephone number in each case.
I made a call to them and learned, as I strongly
suspected, both checks were frauds.
I tentively agreed to participate in a number of other
of these type of offers, just to see what would develop.
At first I was thinking about gathering information
on these schemes to expose the various methods to
the public. Then I just decided to write about them
in my blog. I have gotten by luckily so far but then
I realized I could be setting myself up with a problem
with Federal, State or foreign laws and so have decided
I have gathered enough materials and do not intend
to test any more of them. One thing, the various offers
do tend to sound very much a like and could very well
be written and organzed by the same people.
I would not advise anyone else to test these offers. You can
and probably will be pestered to no end for your efforts.
