Millon Dollar Nonsense

Goandentist

I have been recieving lots of e-mails for help in return for big bucks. A typical one says there is 50 million $ depoisted in some bank in africa and the account holder is deceased. I get 10-20% of the money if i claim that i am a relative or something like that. Kinda used to getting such mail until I recieved this special one from South Africa.
The guy claimed to be from Zimbabwe and his father has deposited 200 million $ in a bank in SA. He asks me to fly to Joberg and open an account so he can transfer the money to my account . For all my trouble i get 20 million. The part that struck me is this guy says he got my e-mail from the World Trade Expo in Joberg in August last year, which i attended at the Galagher estate in Midrand Joberg. How is this kinda personal information getting around. Sounds preety scary to me that someone knew my whereabouts and i dont even know him.

Any comments.

steven_ber

Have a look at the following thread.

Nigerian scam artists operating in Goa.

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04274108

Sounds like a remake of the old Nigerian scam that has been around for at least 10 years. Don't fall for it!

http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/scams/west_african_e.htm
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNew...529/?hub=WFive

As to how you were put on the list, did you give out your email to anyone or business cards that have your email address? Did you give your email address to the Expo organizers? If so, call them and ask who had access to the attendee list.

Last year, a Canadian television documentary revealed that in 2004, Canadians lost $30,000,000 to these types of scams.

I've received similar emails twice. Don't know why/how they got my email address. I recall reading that those "Pass this email" to 10 friends for good luck are good sources.

Goandentist

I did give my e-mail adress to Subway and Unilever and thats about it . They may have picked it up from there. Its an absolute sham whats happening here and people getting conned out of millions of dollars to these bunch of crooks.

Sama

there are a million internet scams. I must get 5 or 6 a week from "ebay" and "paypal" asking me to "verify" (i.e., give them personal info) my account. I got another one from a "bank" where I don't have an account saying that I needed to verify my account. I looked in the email header (which will tell you from what domain the email came from), got the perpetrator's email address and other info, and sent it to the real bank's fraud dept.

A friend of mine (poor sap) fell for a chain letter scam where if you send $37 to some company that sells 200 pre-addressed mailing labels, you can send the chain letter that you receive, putting your name at the bottom of the list. The next person moves your name up and puts his name at the bottom, etc, etc. You send $1 to the six people on the list, and hopefully when your name gets to the top, you're getting all this money from the 200 people X 6, or some such thing. I told him that the only person making money is the mailing label company (and where do they get all these addresses.....?). My friend is hoping for all this money so he can pay off his bills (from another scam he fell for! ) and retire to India.

yikes, who has time to think of all this crooked stuff?

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kiwi_razz

This scam has been going on for a lot more than 10 years.

I remember seeing a letter when I was in my late teens, so that was at least 17-18 years ago, and even then it was a well known scam. Back then it was African royalty with the money, rather than Zimbabweans. And it precedes popular use of the internet and you got a letter in the post.

I wish I had kept that letter. It would be a collectors item by now. Probably worth a fortune on ebay. haha!!

Nick-H

These last few days I'm getting regular notifications that someone is paying into my PayPal account. Pity it isn't true.

Stuff like this doesn't even get as far as my mail software. I use Mailwasher (There are others, of course) to pick out the spam and delete it before anything gets downloaded.

machadinha

If you send out a mail like that to a zillion random recipients chances are some of them will actually have been there. Like Nick said, don't pay it another thought and just delete unread. My spam after filtering hovers at around 47% and about 1/4 of it is junk like this (probably, can't say I keep track). Oh and try to keep your address off mailinglists, mask it on your personal website, etc., i.e. don't give it out all over the place. There's money to be made by harvesting and distributing email addresses and you can get a CD-rom of such addresses for a handsome fee, chances are you've received messages advertising those even. Never ever reply to spammers either as it just means you have a verified = more valuable address. No matter how careful you are though, the older your address gets the higher the chances of an increased spam rate, as it may just be guessed using nifty dictionary programs and the likes. See also this older but still valuable article: Why Am I Getting All This Spam? Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report (Center for Democracy & Technology, March 2003).

As for

You'd have to be pretty blind though not to understand that you're being conned.

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pkalra

receive atleast 2-3 offers of big money from Africa every month by mail and post , generally from african kingdoms,

could have made billions by now ,

Nick-H

I thought this was going to about American dental bills !

haritha

just delete

why read and waste time

Rob_The_Pom

It's called a 419 Scam and virtually all of them originate from Nigeria.
Here's a site with a few more details:-
http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/

Some of them I quite funny. I once had one claiming to come from a friend of Diana, Princess of Wales. They wanted 'me' to help with the transcaction so Prince Phillip couldn't get his hands on it.

Hope that helps,

Rob

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ChrisJ

Here is a more lighthearted take on the 419ers

http://www.ebolamonkeyman.com/

Rob_The_Pom

Magnificent site Chris, thanks for the link!

iwanttogoback

and i thought i was the only one to get e-mails from african princesses!

like your mamma probably said, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.