Wednesday 21 March 2007

You Can Trust Me

There are some things in life that obviously should be avoided. The seat beside pee wee herman in a cinema for example or Russians carrying Polonium but one of the no-brainers should be emails from Nigerian ex-Government ministers with £80m burning a hole in their bank account.
Obviously, many people have wood pulp for brains because according to the Internet Crime Complaint Centre report that landed on my desk this morning, the Nigerian letter fraud is the highest grossing scam for fraudsters.
Internet auction fraud was the most reported offence, comprising 44.9% of referred complaints.
The majority of reported perpetrators were from the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, Romania, and Italy.
Among complainants, 61.2% were male, nearly half were between the ages of 30 and 50.
There is a way to guarantee your safety online and for the one-time price of £49.99 ($98) i will reveal the secrets that the Internet Police don't want you to know, and i have some cheap Viagra for sale and if anyone can help me with this $80m Nigerian Dollar cheque that needs to be cashed. I will give you half, i promise.

6 comments:

Paula said...

Wait, first I need to send all my personal info to these guys from PayPal who want to check my account. I think it's neat that they're so concerned about my data, don't you?

Kos said...

Just over the past week I've gotten a ton of these emails.

I can't wait until I get my money!

Anonymous said...

I get several a week. I keep telling my boss that THIS time, I'm really rich!


A lot of these things come from Spain and The Netherlands, too.

Don said...

A friend of mine got taken by an online scam. She wasn't stupid. Just had bad credit and was desperate. Filled out forms, talked to someone on the phone, everything. But had to send the first payment before getting the loan. Needless to say, the payment was sent and that was it. And no trail to follow. It really burns me up because this particular scam targets people who can afford the loss the least. Literally takes food out of children's mouths.

Anonymous said...

Don-

That sucks. The ones I get aren't at all real looking. Why would I believe that some organization in the Netherlands is going to give me a million euros because I won some drawing that I didn't know I entered?

My fave was the one I got froma supposedly dying man in Africa who needed a total stranger in New Mexico to help him distribute his millions. His first sentence was "Don't feel sorry for me, because I believe that everyone dies someday."

Where DO people get these wacky beliefs, anyway? :-)

Falling on a bruise said...

I do feel for your friend Don and you are right, it is the ones who can least aford it who get scammed.
On a lighter note, i sometimes get emails offering to enlarge my penis for me, nice trick if they could do that one!