what the hell is with these spam mails????

[madbomber31]

i have 2 very similar to this one: i wonder who responds to them...

MR.WANG QIN
HANG SENG BANK LTD.
DES VOEUX RD.BRANCH
CENTRAL HONG KONG
HONG KONG.
Dear Friend,
I am Mr.Wang Qin, Foreign Exhange Credit Manager of
Hang Seng Bank Ltd, Hong Kong.
I am confident that you are a honorable and reputable
person whom I can vouchsafe in, in confidence, and we
can work together.
On october 4,2001, an American consultant/contractor
with the Chinese Solid Minerals Corporation,
Mr. Smith Lawrence made a (Fixed) Deposit for
twelve calendar months, valued at (Thirty Million
Dollars only) in my branch.
Upon maturity,I sent a routine notification to
his forwarding address but got no reply. After a
month, we sent a reminder and finally we discovered
from his contract employers, the Hong Kong Solid
Minerals Corporation that Mr. Smith Lawrence died
from an automobile accident. On further
investigation,I found out that he died without making
a will, and all attempts to trace his next of kin was
fruitless.

yada yada yada blah blah blah

 

[bran987]

classic old scam

 

[stilleto]

only two? i get a few of those PER DAY.

 

[digger]

They're called "419" after the Nigerian law they break. They're also called "Advance Fee Fraud," because you'll find out (if you respond) that they want you to send them some money to grease the wheels. No, we can't dip into the eleventy billion dollars you're going to get, no, you have to send us a few thousand first. Uh-huh, right.

This scam was real popular back around 1880, when they actually mailed it to you with all sort of fancy fake rubber stamps and stationery to make it more convincing. Now it's just stupid. There are lots of sites where people string them along and make fun of them, but even that has stopped being funny. (They get the scammers to pose holding up signs and doing stupid shit to "identify" themselves. One guy replied using the names from H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories and tried to scam the scammer into thinking that he was going to be eaten by Chthulu. Whoopie.)

You're facing a bunch of semi-literates who make twenty bucks a year. They're getting paid maybe twenty cents an hour to sit at an Internet cafe and cut-and-paste these for the local gang boss.

You know the "type the letters in this picture" test that's supposed to keep the spam bots out? The scammers get around those by paying these people to answer them and then turn the PC over to the spam script.

Who falls for it? The world is full of stupid, greedy people. People who answer the mail, send money, and sometimes even fly to f-cking NIGERIA to pick up "their" money. Several of them have been arrested on arrival; they were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were killed by the gangs. "Whoo, free US passport, thank you." WHACK!

One Nigerian consular official was murdered by an angry "victim" who lost his shirt to the scam. (Note the sarcastic quotes around "victim" -- because he was an asshat before he became a murderer.)

 

[stilleto]

Nigeria is known amoung a few communities as a country of scammers. the social security office in... i don't know what state was 'infultrated' by an employee, who was nigerian. He sold thousands of SS#s to identity thieves. My local bank told me that of all the countries of origin of people who commit bank fraud- more than half are nigerian.

anyway, i read about this particular scam once- they purposely spell poorly, are overly polite, and do what they can to appeal to some poor schmuck's softspot.