The scammers are getting lazy in their attempts to extract key bits of information from what’s known as the 419 scam. Often seen with elaborate tales of needing to transfer money from Nigeria or other African country on the brink of a coup, the too-good-to-be-true offer of giving you a percentage of the amount of money you’d help to move across international borders plays on the greed of every day folk. A variation of the scam, like in the image above, is that one has become a winner of a lottery. I can’t believe that anyone still falls for it, though perhaps some do, else the scammers wouldn’t have moved off of this now. Perhaps then, they just settle for a half-hearted attempt at extracting your details. This is what I just received:
I have a Business Proposal of $21,300,000.00 for you to handle with me from my bank. I need to know if you will be able to handle this with me, if you agree to work with me please send me your: 1,Full names; 2,occupation; 3,private phone number; 4,current residential address. Regards Liu Tia Ling
That’s all there was. I received two copies to the same email address at the same time, so not only is it suspicious by being sent twice, there’s no story to entertain the readers and draw them into their little plan. Come on scammers, get with it!
Image: Afro_Euro_Certificate by sinabeet with Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment and subscribing to the RSS feed or subscribing via email to have future articles delivered to your feed reader or email inbox.
Comments on this entry are closed.