Hi All,

Today I received an email from some person claiming to be associated with the Nigerian Federal Government Contract Review Panel, requesting assistance in transferring large sums of money.

That person then explained that these funds were acquired during the regime of the last Military transitional government of Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar. Appearantly government officials set up companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over invoiced in various ministries.

The message included return email address and a fax number (both of which check out) and some further details to make it look genuine. A backtrace of the msg even prooves the origin of the msg...

Admittedly I got interrested but still there was this little voice that said something was fishy...so I did a search on the person's name...
yeah, right, government official, well it turns out that may very well be true, but the fact remains that it is nothing more than a BIG SCAM...

For more information go to this page to read up on the dangers which may face you...
Nigerian Advance Fee 419 Fraud Scams

JarC

Oh no, not that one again. Apparently they keep finding people to fall for it. You'd think after a few years, they'd at least use a different country.

Why would they if they have actual government and banking officials in their pocket and actively participating in the scam?

Check this out:

/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1136

Get yourself a beer, sit down in front of your computer, then check out these two links.

And have fun!

http://www.geocities.com/a_kerenx/

http://sweetchillisauce.com/nigeria.html

(initial contact via email) + (fishy-sounding deal) = (spam scam)^(every time!)

C'mon now... Even if it checks out, if you have no effective recourse against the person that you enter into a business arrangement with, in the event of a breach of the agreement, you can almost certainly expect to be scammed. In this case, the goal is to gain access to you financial identity information. When they are finished stealing money from the account that you provide for them (yes, they will insist that there be funds on deposit), they will then print checks on it, and try to use it to capture enough identity information about you, to enable them to open credit accounts, and otherwise use your financial identity to their benefit. What they cannot use, themselves, they will then sell to other criminals, and to other spammers (since you obviously respond well to offers to get rich quick).

Never, never, NEVER respond to offers for ANYTHING, that come to you via email. If they offer to place a million dollars in cash at your feet, IT'S STILL A SCAM! If they really meant it, they'd use postal mail, where you have federal legal recourse, or they'd just deliver the money to you, in person. The do not need to notify you via email, and indeed, I've never heard of ANYONE getting ANYTHING this way, that they would not have gotten some other way, if they were not responsive to email. Email affords them immunity to federal mail fraud law, in addition to effective psuedonymity or anonymity. If they meant it, they would not be afraid of federal mail fraud law, nor would they need to hide their identity.

The Nigerian scam is notorious for basing it's credibility on the notion that the perpetrator is trying to evade legal financial action in the first place. This gives the perpetrator legitimate reason for needing to protect their identity - and should be your first clue that this is a scam. If they are trying to evade legal financial action against them, by moving the money through a third party, then they are already pulling a scam. That they have no one else to turn to - no one that they trust - is further warning that they do not merit anyone's trust.

Everybody has a sob story. My advice to the 'real' Nigerian heiress, is that she tell it to someone who cares. My advice to the strangers that she contacts, is to ignore her. If, after all these years, she still hasn't gotten her money out of the country, then she lost it a long time ago.

I've been getting a lot of these lately! Nigeria is the big one, but I've seen the same scam with South Africa and Zambia mentioned. My modus operandi with these types of scam/spam is to report them to the ISP hosting their email address. Since that is (probably) their initial, primary point of contact, closing that one address shuts down their entire mailing batch. Easy and effective?

I personally like tmda.net.

Here is an article in our local paper that you might find interesting, I have recieved four of the emails, and ignored it but some may not be warned!!!!!!!!

Printed in the Oxford Mail july 14th
"Oxfordshire buisnesses and residents are again being urged to ignore"begging" e-mails, letters and faxes supposedly sent from Nigeria and other West African countries. Oxfordshire Trading Standards warned that fraudsters could be behind the messages, which ask people to act as "guardians" of US dollars. The messages claim surplus Government and commercial funds are languishing in secret accounts and ask people to give thier bank account details so some of the money can be transferred. Nigel Strick, of Oxfordshire trading Standards, said: "Its extremely unlikely that this money exsits. The only resaon for pretending it does is to persuade people to reveal information about their bank accounts"
for more details visit
www.oxonts.org.uk, or call 01865 815000

Ah, so chances are I haven't actually won 20 million in the dutch lottery that though I never entered, I had a winning numbers to....

*sigh*...back to work then...

I do find some aspects of these e-mails curious though, my personalised work account gets very little spam, perhaps 1-2 messages per week, and it is only the Nigerian style scams that I receive, so where they got my address from that the other spammers haven't yet is certainly a mystery to me....I haven't gone to great lengths to protect that address I will admit.....(why would I, I use Mailwasher )

But still it's a trend I'm watching closely...

well after posting this article on the forums I visit it has been interesting to say the least to read the threads, if as people say this scam has been going on for years why has no one been prosicuted?Why are they so hard to find. And even why do they bother....because if 20 peeps know its a scam their are probably 1 who dosent....thats all it takes some one vunurable and trusting to give out their deatils....a person very close to me would be taken in by this, they have been interesed in pyramid selling on and off for years and why because the most vunerable people arnt the sick or old its the POOR and they will do anything to get a quick buck, why?....thats a different thread!!

Aren't we at war with Nigeria - this might be true?!?

Aren't we at war with everyone?

You might be thinking of Liberia, whose official government we support. But some rebels have gone and took over, and Pres. Bush is-a saber rattlin.
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Anyway, I have five email addresses. The two I've had since 1997 get the most spam, as you can expect. Most of it is filtered by the providers.

The three addresses I created within the last twelve months (one of which is actually posted on a website) get zero spam. The spam resistance is due to two things:
1. The addresses include punctuation, so they're hard to hit by random.
2. The web-posted address is Unicode encoded. Actually, the @ sign is replaced by "ampersand-pound-64;". (I had to spell it out -- otherwise the board converts it.)