Apologies to Cheryl if she is not a scammer but I am sure she is.
On the 11th May I got an enquiry from Cheryl Stevens to which I responded “I’m full�. Nevertheless her e-mails continued on the basis that she was booked in with me. I then got an e-mail from her uncle’s “Financial Secretary� telling me he is sending, by courier, a cheque for 5000€ and instructing me to deduct my bit and to send the balance to her Travel Agent.
My reaction was “you must be f*****g joking�. That’s not what I said; it’s just what I thought.
The original enquiry was through a Rental Site, it was short and to the point and the English was a quite normal US version of the language.
Do these people ever get away with such things? Is there anybody sufficiently stupid to fall for it?
Alan (I’ll be Fluffy tomorrow).
Cheryl Stevens
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Alan Knighting
- Posts: 4120
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- Location: Monflanquin, Lot-et-Garonne, France
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Mountain Goat
- Posts: 6070
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- Location: Leysin, Alpes Vaudoises, Switzerland
- Contact:
Alan
$5 Billion/year according to:
http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/
and Nigeria's 3rd to 5th largest industry, though not quite sure what No. 2 and 4 are.
Personally can't resist them, you never know when you're going to get the real thing, and $1.5 million would come in useful this month.
http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml
is informative, though can't work out if that's a scam as well (job vacancies at bottom right). Nothing like MI5's website.
TruBrit stuff at:
http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/419.htm
last, but not least, Interpol:
http://www.interpol.int/Public/Financia ... efault.asp
Goat
$5 Billion/year according to:
http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/
and Nigeria's 3rd to 5th largest industry, though not quite sure what No. 2 and 4 are.
Personally can't resist them, you never know when you're going to get the real thing, and $1.5 million would come in useful this month.
http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml
is informative, though can't work out if that's a scam as well (job vacancies at bottom right). Nothing like MI5's website.
TruBrit stuff at:
http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/419.htm
last, but not least, Interpol:
http://www.interpol.int/Public/Financia ... efault.asp
Goat
Last edited by Mountain Goat on Wed May 17, 2006 12:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Alan Knighting
- Posts: 4120
- Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:26 am
- Location: Monflanquin, Lot-et-Garonne, France
Goat,
A couple of million would come in real handy, any time. A job which returns thousands a week for doing nothing would be great.
Trouble is, I'm too much of a cynic. I’m sure I heard “suck my somethingorother� quoted in a movie and that’s the way I feel towards these irresistible offers.
Alan
A couple of million would come in real handy, any time. A job which returns thousands a week for doing nothing would be great.
Trouble is, I'm too much of a cynic. I’m sure I heard “suck my somethingorother� quoted in a movie and that’s the way I feel towards these irresistible offers.
Alan
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Alan Knighting
- Posts: 4120
- Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:26 am
- Location: Monflanquin, Lot-et-Garonne, France
A quick up-date on the Cheryl front.
Not surprisingly - total silence since I said I would not accept the kind offer of more money than I would know what to do with.
Very disappointingly - no response whatever from the Rental Site to my report of a scam. If anyone wants to know, it was Vacation France.
Alan
Not surprisingly - total silence since I said I would not accept the kind offer of more money than I would know what to do with.
Very disappointingly - no response whatever from the Rental Site to my report of a scam. If anyone wants to know, it was Vacation France.
Alan
The terrible thing is that the scammers do get away with their tricks.
Recently I reported a scam to a rental site. I do not usually bother, but this one was just about believable.
The reaction from the rental site was prompt, but they later told me that one of their customers on Cyprus had been conned out of 2000 pound before they could warn him.
Recently I reported a scam to a rental site. I do not usually bother, but this one was just about believable.
The reaction from the rental site was prompt, but they later told me that one of their customers on Cyprus had been conned out of 2000 pound before they could warn him.
Online Scams Create "Yahoo! Millionaires" - FORTUN
In Lagos, where scamming is an art, the quickest path to wealth for the cyber-generation runs through a computer screen.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Leonard Lawal, FORTUNE
May 22, 2006: 3:28 PM EDT
(FORTUNE Magazine) - Akin is, like many things in cyberspace, an alias. In real life he's 14. He wears Adidas sneakers, a Rolex Submariner watch, and a kilo of gold around his neck.
Akin, who lives in Lagos, is one of a new generation of entrepreneurs that has emerged in this city of 15 million, Nigeria's largest. His mother makes $30 a month as a cleaner, his father about the same hustling at bus stations. But Akin has made it big working long days at Internet cafes and is now the main provider for his family and legions of relatives.
Call him a "Yahoo! millionaire."
Akin buys things online - laptops, BlackBerries, cameras, flat-screen TVs - using stolen credit cards and aliases. He has the loot shipped via FedEx or DHL to safe houses in Europe, where it is received by friends, then shipped on to Lagos to be sold on the black market. (He figures Americans are too smart to sell a camera on eBay to a buyer with an address in Nigeria.)
Akin's main office is an Internet cafe in the Ikeja section of Lagos. He spends up to ten hours a day there, seven days a week, huddled over one of 50 computers, working his scams.
And he's not alone: The cafe is crowded most of the time with other teenagers, like Akin, working for a "chairman" who buys the computer time and hires them to extract e-mail addresses and credit card information from the thin air of cyberspace. Akin's chairman, who is computer illiterate, gets a 60 percent cut and reserves another 20 percent to pay off law enforcement officials who come around or teachers who complain when the boys cut school. That still puts plenty of cash in Akin's pocket.
A sign at the door of the cafe reads, WE DO NOT TOLERATE SCAMS IN THIS PLACE. DO NOT USE E-MAIL EXTRACTORS OR SEND MULTIPLE MAILS OR HACK CREDIT CARDS. YOU WILL BE HANDED OVER TO THE POLICE. NO 419 ACTIVITY IN THIS CAFE. The sign is a joke; 419 activity, which refers to the section of the Nigerian law dealing with obtaining things by trickery, is a national pastime. There are no coherent laws relating to e-scams, the police are mostly computer illiterate, and penalties for financial crimes are light.
No penalties for breaking the law
"The deterrent factor is not there at all," says Thomas Oli, a Lagos lawyer, citing the case of a former police inspector general who was convicted of stealing more than $100 million and got only six months in jail.
"What do you want me to do?" Akin asks in pidgin English, explaining why he turned to a life of Internet crime. "It is my God-given talent. Our politicians, they do their own; me, I'm doing my own. I feed my family - my sister, my mother, my popsie. Man must survive."
The scams perpetrated by Akin and his comrades are many and varied: moneygram interceptions, Western Union hijackings, check laundering, identity theft, and outright begging, with tall tales of dying relatives and large sums of money in search of safe haven. One popular online fraud often practiced by women (or boys pretending to be women) involves separating lonely men from their money.
Attempts to speak to government officials about Internet crime were futile. They all claimed ignorance of such scams; some laughed it off as Western propaganda.
But last November the Economic Fraud and Financial Crimes Commission won a high-profile case that had dragged on for years against Emmanuel Nwude, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years for bilking a Brazilian bank out of $242 million using an Internet scam involving phony bank drafts. The commission is also pursuing a case against 419 kingpin Fred Ajudua, a lawyer and businessman accused of using the Internet to steal $1 million from a victim in Germany.
Some officials, who asked not be identified, said young people are drawn to Internet crime as a way of getting back at a society that has no plans for them. Others see it as a form of reparation for the sins of the West.
Or as Akin puts it, "White people are too gullible. They are rich, and whatever I gyp them out of is small change to them."
FORTUNE Magazine
By Leonard Lawal, FORTUNE
May 22, 2006: 3:28 PM EDT
(FORTUNE Magazine) - Akin is, like many things in cyberspace, an alias. In real life he's 14. He wears Adidas sneakers, a Rolex Submariner watch, and a kilo of gold around his neck.
Akin, who lives in Lagos, is one of a new generation of entrepreneurs that has emerged in this city of 15 million, Nigeria's largest. His mother makes $30 a month as a cleaner, his father about the same hustling at bus stations. But Akin has made it big working long days at Internet cafes and is now the main provider for his family and legions of relatives.
Call him a "Yahoo! millionaire."
Akin buys things online - laptops, BlackBerries, cameras, flat-screen TVs - using stolen credit cards and aliases. He has the loot shipped via FedEx or DHL to safe houses in Europe, where it is received by friends, then shipped on to Lagos to be sold on the black market. (He figures Americans are too smart to sell a camera on eBay to a buyer with an address in Nigeria.)
Akin's main office is an Internet cafe in the Ikeja section of Lagos. He spends up to ten hours a day there, seven days a week, huddled over one of 50 computers, working his scams.
And he's not alone: The cafe is crowded most of the time with other teenagers, like Akin, working for a "chairman" who buys the computer time and hires them to extract e-mail addresses and credit card information from the thin air of cyberspace. Akin's chairman, who is computer illiterate, gets a 60 percent cut and reserves another 20 percent to pay off law enforcement officials who come around or teachers who complain when the boys cut school. That still puts plenty of cash in Akin's pocket.
A sign at the door of the cafe reads, WE DO NOT TOLERATE SCAMS IN THIS PLACE. DO NOT USE E-MAIL EXTRACTORS OR SEND MULTIPLE MAILS OR HACK CREDIT CARDS. YOU WILL BE HANDED OVER TO THE POLICE. NO 419 ACTIVITY IN THIS CAFE. The sign is a joke; 419 activity, which refers to the section of the Nigerian law dealing with obtaining things by trickery, is a national pastime. There are no coherent laws relating to e-scams, the police are mostly computer illiterate, and penalties for financial crimes are light.
No penalties for breaking the law
"The deterrent factor is not there at all," says Thomas Oli, a Lagos lawyer, citing the case of a former police inspector general who was convicted of stealing more than $100 million and got only six months in jail.
"What do you want me to do?" Akin asks in pidgin English, explaining why he turned to a life of Internet crime. "It is my God-given talent. Our politicians, they do their own; me, I'm doing my own. I feed my family - my sister, my mother, my popsie. Man must survive."
The scams perpetrated by Akin and his comrades are many and varied: moneygram interceptions, Western Union hijackings, check laundering, identity theft, and outright begging, with tall tales of dying relatives and large sums of money in search of safe haven. One popular online fraud often practiced by women (or boys pretending to be women) involves separating lonely men from their money.
Attempts to speak to government officials about Internet crime were futile. They all claimed ignorance of such scams; some laughed it off as Western propaganda.
But last November the Economic Fraud and Financial Crimes Commission won a high-profile case that had dragged on for years against Emmanuel Nwude, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years for bilking a Brazilian bank out of $242 million using an Internet scam involving phony bank drafts. The commission is also pursuing a case against 419 kingpin Fred Ajudua, a lawyer and businessman accused of using the Internet to steal $1 million from a victim in Germany.
Some officials, who asked not be identified, said young people are drawn to Internet crime as a way of getting back at a society that has no plans for them. Others see it as a form of reparation for the sins of the West.
Or as Akin puts it, "White people are too gullible. They are rich, and whatever I gyp them out of is small change to them."