Forum Moderators: phranque
Posing as senior Nigerian government officials, they seek the assistance of people abroad to transfer huge sums of money into foreign bank accounts.
Aparently there are thousands of them. I've only heard from a few hundred...and Nigeria isn't the only country anymore. My husband and I are collecting variations from other countries...But that's for another thread.
The article is here [news.bbc.co.uk].
Email just gave them the opportunity to hit more potentially gullible victims.
The sort of deal they are offering will only catch out people who are fairly dubious in the first place.
Nearly every free email address provider has a spamreport facility starting with abuse@...
(abuse@yahoo.com). You should forward everyone back to the provider. Sooner later they should get fed up as well and create some kind of automatic blocking of these emails.
Lawman
The U.S. Secret Service has a warning about the scam on their website at [secretservice.gov...] .
From what I've read, this scam can be dangerous in ways other than financial, too. Marks are lured to Nigeria or other African countries where they are fleeced for everything they have on them and subject to assault, kidnapping, etc.
One of the oldest scams going. Biggest thing is to forward full headers and spam to the fbi and not reply to the spammers. That opens another can of worms....
[info.gov.hk...]
(Which actually has 13 entries)
We had spoke about this scam in [webmasterworld.com...]
