InsaneJournal

Current mood:

tired

Scam - Advance Fee Fraud (419) Type
So I've decided to broaden my horizons a bit by dealing with the other popular type of scam landing in my email box - the "advance fee fraud". These are the ones which involve you being promised this huge sum of money (because Reasons), but if you reply to the email, you'll be asked to forward a bit of money yourself (maybe about $1000) to cover "administration costs" or "access fees" or whatever.

These frauds hope to hook you in using your greed, waving the large sum of money you could get tomorrow under your nose, and making you blind to the amount of money you'll wind up paying out today. The simplest way to deal with them is not to reply to them.

So, with that out of the way, let's look at the actual scam. I'll be putting these under a cut, because they tend to be long-winded. I've added in some comments - the original scam is in italics, while my stuff is in plain text.



Apparently-From: Mike Allen (test@rediffmail.com)
Subject: [Bulk] To the email owner
Reply-To: (mikeallen35101@1email.eu)
Addressed to me: Yes

>From Desk of Mike Allen,
International Fraud monitoring Unit,
Regional Head quarter, Economic community
of west Africa States (ECOWAS ) Accra Ghana.

Attention:To Email Owner


Following the recent directives from Economic Community of West Africa special committee on fraud victims, I am please to inform you that your email address was found

to be one of the fraud victims email contact,which ECOWAS committee has resolve to compensation with sum of us$400.000.00(four hundred thousand united state dollars)

to enable you get back on your feet and move on with life.

(Nice one! This one is pretty obviously targetting victims of previous such scams, basically in the hopes they're going to be foolish enough to fall for the same trick twice. The sad thing is that yes, some people are. But, here you go with the basics of the genre: the large reward ($400,000 US) being offered effectively out of the blue.

Let me reiterate the basic rule of scam avoidance: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

If you have been the victim of a similar scam before this, bear in mind the following: the police in your country of origin, not to mention whatever consumer safety advocates you have there - here in Australia it's the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - are probably your best bets for getting any of the money you've been defrauded by back to you. Trusting random emails like this one is probably how you got into the mess in the first place.)

Base on this directive we have finalize arrangement with a commercial bank in Ghana,(ZENITH bank Accra Ghana) to pay you these funds by ATM visa CARD,this means of

payment was choosen to make it easy for you to have access to your compensation funds and avoid the problem that characterizes bank to bank cable wire transfer from

Africa.

Your compensation has been processed and approve for release to you by our regional office in Accra Ghana through Zenith bank Ghana after series of investigation on

your merit to the said compensation funds.

Considering the spate of identification theft, especially where huge sum of money is involved, We will like you to visit our regional office in Ghana within the next

two weeks to receive this ATM card in person.

However if you could not be able to visit our office in Accra Ghana West Africa for any reason, We can arrange to deliver your ATM VISA card to you in your country via

courier delivery service because of its value.

(And this is how they're going to be hooking money out of you. Courier costs, delivery fees, customs charges to get that ATM card to you - they'll give you any number of reasons why they can't give you the money right now... but if you just pay this small fee, they'll be able to give you the money tomorrow. Then there's another small fee, and another and another and another... and before you know it, they've walked off with about $10,000 of your money. If it helps, that large sum of money up the page? That's probably their target amount for the scam. Think how many suckers they'd need paying $10,000 apiece to get that amount - and make it as hard as possible for the little darlings.)

On recipt of your response to this email we will send to you contact information of whom to contact at the bank for a follow up from your side, to enable them complete

loading of your compensation funds on the ATM VISA card before delivering it to you in your country for the needful.

Reply urgent.

Regards,

Mike Allen.

As always, the safest thing to do with these sorts of things is delete them on sight.

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