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Does anybody really fall for these tricks?
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Does anybody really fall for these tricks?
Oh yes. Big time. As Arfur Daley said - \"there\'s loads of mugs out there Terence, all we gotta do is get to them\".
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Does anybody really fall for these tricks?
My neighbours are Nigerian and the husband is quite often approached for help in trying to rescue people\'s money after they have fallen for this scam. (Apparently he has connections!!!!!)
He told me that someone who had approached him from Germany was stung for $300,000
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Funnily enough, I got one of the funds transfer assistance required scams this morning, first one for a few months.
Must be the silly season!
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Our Nigerian friend appears to have downsized a bit from the usual £30 million dollars he wants to share with us!
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an inimate knowledge of South Africa (where many Scammers are based) and Lagos and environs allows me to set up hotmail addresses, and anti-scam these palookas.
I have them running about all over the shop, looking for me.
My latest efforts involve having a gentlemen of ill-intent visit a hostelry inabitted by Village People types, and ask for me. (Me being in the guise of Swedish sea Captain Vigris Roggering...)
When I get their phone numbers, I really go to town, setting up a multitude of free classified advertisments offering a variety of strange services.
But HJ\'s original scam has seen plenty of people lose badly ... take the cheque, pay the balance to the \'shipper\' who will collect goods... then see cheque bounce through the roof, and no shipper appears.
For more fun with the Lads from Lagos, see:
www.ebolamonkeyman.com
www.scamorama.com
Some of the signs they have these mugus holding at the airport are priceless!
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Ian, thanks, I had a very good couple of hours reading your links. Especially the anti-scam stories on scamorama.
Also try the Solomon one on www.africanscam.co.uk/
Please, everyone, be warned of very strong language and the occasional explicit photo in all these external scam links!
Praise the Lord!
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Agree, he certainly has low expectations. I would normally expect to hear about the $300m in Democratic Republic of Congo government bonds he has in a locked trunk in Togo, the key to which was handed to him by his Aunt Jemima before she was cut down by rebel bullets, and which he will share with me provided I give him my bank account info and send him $10,000 for \"facilitation fees\". Set of tyres only? What a Cheap Charlie.
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Yep, some guy who was a previous Mayor of Northampton (and of Polish origin) went for it, he flew to Johannesburg to meet the Nigerians and was promtly abducted and held for ransom, they let him call his wife and he spoke to her in Polish and told her where to send the police. The police arrived, there was a gun battle and one of the Nigerians ended up dead. So yes there are really people out there that dumn. He emerged unscathed I might add.
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I used to use an accountant years ago (a Nigerian) who had lost several tens of thousands of pounds to one of the scams. Despite being able to go out and try to track down the perpetrator, he still came back empty handed.
Below is from www.karting.co.uk/MP/scam.html . The final sentence is the vital one!
There have been reports of offers to purchase kart equipment coming from West Africa, and Nigeria in particular. The usual form is that the \'buyer\' (who often has a .co.uk or other European email address), poses as a kart dealer and requests further information and pictures of the kart being sold. Very soon after an offer is made in which it\'s usually stated that payment will be made by a bank cheque in Sterling and drawn on a British bank. At this point the buyer will usually mention that the amount of the cheque will be far in excess of the agreed amount for your equipment. As you are an honest and trustworthy person (you are, aren\'t you?) the buyer will temporarily entrust you with the extra money, but asks you to return the difference to them.
Once you receive the cheque (which looks perfectly valid) you cash it at the bank, wait for it clear and once you have the money in your account you send the agreed balance back to the buyer. They will almost always request that you pay the balance back to them using wire transfer or Western Union Money Transfer - both processes are virtually instant and irreversible. However, several weeks later your bank may contact you to advise that the cheque was counterfeit, and you are required to repay the amount to the bank. The buyer has disappeared (or now operating under another name from a different email address) and you\'re out of pocket for a lot of money - ouch!
Remember: If you\'re approached with an offer like this it\'s highly likely to be either money laundering or some other illegal proposal. Don\'t get involved! It\'s a variation of a worldwide scam that has been running since the early 1980\'s - in it\'s more common form people usually receive an email, letter or fax promising you a cut of tens of millions of pounds/dollars if you help the person get money out of his country. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!
V
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Both Hawkeye and FiF will confirm the Yorkshire Eleventh Commandment:
\"Thou gits nowt fer nowt\"
DVD
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Yup, and in forum-speak TNSTAAFL. The Iraqis are at it now as well.
cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/252847.htm
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There\'s a nice \'biter bit\' Nigerian story on:
www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/31270.html
Only £171, but good to see, nonetheless.
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I\'m surprised the Nigerian government isn\'t more concerned about stopping these scams. Don\'t they cast a doubt about all business dealings with Nigeria, even legitimate ones?
Call me prejudiced, but now as soon as I read the word \'Nigeria\' I assume the whole thing is bogus and the people involved crooks. Aren\'t honest Nigerians bothered about this?
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I\'m surprised the Nigerian government isn\'t more concerned about stopping these scams. THEY COULDN\'T GIVE A MONKEYS, I\'M SURE. THEY ARE THE 8TH RICHEST NATION ON EARTH, AND THE GOVT HAVE THEIR HANDS SO DEEP IN THE TILL IT IS RIDICULOUS! I\'VE SEEN MORE SPORTS CARS ON THE ROADS IN LAGOS THAN IN CAPE TOWN... AND THEIR ROADS ARE THE WORST I HAVE EVER SEEN. THE POVERTY-GAP TWIXT RICH AND POOR THERE IS WORSE THAN IT EVER WAS EVEN UNDER THE OLD APARTHEID REGIME HERE.
>>Don\'t they cast a doubt about all business dealings withNigeria, even legitimate ones?
YEP. IT TOOK MY EMPLOYERS A LONG TIME TO BE CONVINCED TO DO BUSINESS THERE. EVEN NOW, THOUGH, WE DEAL WITH UNSCRUPULOUS PEOPLE ON A DAILY BASIS IN NIGERIA...Call me prejudiced, but now as soon as I read the word \'Nigeria\' I assume the whole thing is bogus and the people involved crooks. HIGHLY LIKELY!
Aren\'t honest Nigerians bothered about this?YES, I\'M SURE THEY ARE.
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I only went once to Lagos in the 80\'s. My company provided me with an armed bodyguard to take me the 100 metres to the company car in the car park.
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Over the years, Brad Christensen has been deluged with every type of \"URGENT\" offer imaginable from Nigerian scam artists. Finally, he decided to fight back by conning the con men. With humor and imagination as his weapons, Christensen preyed on the scammers\' abundant supply of greed and ignorance, taking our 419 friends for quite a ride, and always at their own expense. What follows are some of Christensen\'s more creative exchanges?
www.quatloos.com/brad_christensen.htm
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Still on the subject of scams, many of us suffer from limescale problems due to the nature of the water supply. However, on the market, for a few tens of pounds, you can buy an \'electronic water conditioner\'.
One sample I looked at was in a plastic box about 5 inches square and 2 inches deep. It was powered from a small mains power supply capable of suplying up to about 5 watts to the electronics.
The box had two thin plastic covered wires from it. Each about 2 yards long. The idea is that, on the rising water main or other supply pipe, you wrap first one wire round it, then move along a little and then wrap the other round it.
The box has a pretty flashing light to show it is working but otherwise that is just for show.
As to an opinion on the box, I leave that to a later post.
Meanwhile has anyone else any experience of these \'water conditioners\' or opinion as to how effective they think they are ?
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Someone in America is selling a wonderful gizmo, similar to the water one, which you attach to the fuel pipe in your car.
It cleans the fuel, improves your fuel consumption by 30% and, get this, gives you up to 40% improvement of the bhp!
All this for only $99.99
I think I'll get 24 - one for each valve!
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Water conditioning.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I liked the petrol fuel pipe scam. Akin to the perpetual motion club. You can put in a small amount of electric power/energy and get so much fuel power gain as to be able to consider using it as rocket fuel !
I have met 3 people who bought the water processing one and they all believe it works. As justification, one says he has had no more problems with the weed growing in his fishpond --- he cleaned it out and fitted one and his previous rampant growth has now become controlable or non-existant, I forget. You will not be calling him as an expert witness.
Another person that still thinks/assumes it works.
And the third person who handed one to me to look at because "it did work when I first fitted it but it has since stopped working". She knows it worked because she cleaned the kettle and it took 3 weeks to fur up instead of the usual one. The idea that the water company might have supplied different water did not occur to her.
Inside it I found the electronic equivalent of using an 18 volt battery with a wire coming from each end.
The effect of the wires wrapped around a copper pipe would be totally useless because the pipe would screen them from the water inside. Even supposing that the 18 volts via insulated wires would be able to work in the first place, which needs a lot of imagination. But the flashng light looks good.
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I understood the principle was that the magnetic field produced by the coils changes the polarity of the particles in the water and prevents them adhering to the pipes etc. Or something like that anyway.
I have one and since fitting it about 18 months ago we have noticed a reduction in limescale although it is still a problem.
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Are your two wires separated ? In other words not connected to each other ?
No connection, no current flow. No current flow, no magnetic field.
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This is all worryingly off the motoring arena but:
"Which" did a test of these electronic water gizmos and found that sometimes they work, sometimes they don't - seems to be sheer luck. Their advice is to get one on approval and return it if it doesn't work. I don't particularly like "Which", but they do test things reasonably well, so I suspect there may be something in it. I don't think it's just snake oil.
V
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christensen is a rank amateur compared to the ebolamonkeyman.com and some of the guys on scamorama.com!
There, such characters as Ronnie and Reggie Kray and David Lee Roth pit their wits against the scammers, and come out tops!
On a motoring theme, there are plenty of cars in Lagos and environs which are imported from Europe... and they don't even bother with tidying them up/repainting them. It's amazing to see a truck from Van Groote's Butchery of Utrecht or LeFarge's Bakers of Versaille bowling past you on the Ilorin Causeway!
(Either that, or these Europeans take their deliveries seriously!)
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Nothing on the scale of our West African friends I know, but it never ceases to amaze me how many people fall for the leftover M25 tarmac scam. Another elderly neighbour has sadly just been conned into having his drive/path partially covered with a truly ugly layer of tarmac so thin you can almost see the concrete beneath it. In places it even covers his lawn!! No doubt he'll have been conned into believing this stuff won't blow away in the next storm and have paid well over the odds for the privilege!
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Colin,
The Brad Christianson link is great. Only read a couple but will make time to read them all!
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I have spent a ridiculous amount of time this afternoon reading the Brad Christiansen link, and have come to the conclusion that if I ever get one of these mails I will have to do something similar.
Sadly, the Nigerians have not mailed me as yet - they must already know the state of my bank account. :(
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I like his site too. I was tempted to join in but guessed the scammers might just have some dodgy mafia links and decided against.
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Hmm - perhaps I won't after all then...
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