The notorious “419 scams” have been around since the early days of the consumer internet.
419 scams are the elaborate internet frauds that try to convince people they unexpectedly come into money. Once a gullible victim takes the bait, they are duped into paying a range of ‘facilitation fees’ and costs that drains their saving.
The term 419 scam comes from the Nigerian criminal code that covers this crime, which was appropriate as most — although not all — of these emails originated from the country.
For a while in the early 2000s, internet users became used to receiving a few 419 scam emails every day but by the middle of the decade they largely dried up as the even the most gullible and greedy idiots became wise to the schemes.
That’s not to say they have completely vanished, this morning quite a distasteful one landed in my inbox.
Greetings,
I wish to seek your assistance to execute a business deal. I am Paul Williams a Contract Agent based in London. I require your consent to present you as next of kin to a client of mine, who died along with his wife and Two kids in the Asian Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines leaving behind a large sum of money without a next of kin. With your co-operation and information available to me you can make a claim on the funds as the next of kin to my deceased client. After release of the funds to you by the financial institution where it is lodged, we can share according to a percentage we agree upon. If you may be of assistance, please reply for further co-operation.
Best Regards,Paul Williams.
It’s unlikely that Paul Williams exists and even if he did it’s unlikely he’d have anything to do with this unsavory scam that most people would immediate bin when they receive it.
Binning the message was my reaction as well, but as I was about to, it occurred to me that there are enough venal, stupid people in the world who would agree to be involved in such a deal.
No doubt if you asked them they’d say defrauding the deceased family’s estate is a victimless crime as the money would only end up with the government anyway, these people would swear blind they are honest, honourable folk and no doubt they would think they are rather clever.
It’s worth reflecting that dishonest, venal and somewhat dim people do occasionally get their come-uppance in today’s world.
There’s something that I think is worth pointing out about scam e-mails, which I have never heard anyone else point out, but which strikes me as a pretty reliable guide to scam e-mail. It’s simply that almost all the scams are written with faulty, usually terrible, grammar, spelling, and punctuation – whereas legitimate e-mail from respectable organizations is usually correct in these things. But perhaps education in such niceties of writing style is less nowadays than in former decades, so that many people simply may not be able to tell the difference, and the scamsters can get away with their bad writing style. But why do articles on scam e-mails never point this out?
An important point to note is no matter how see through and grammatically incorrect, these emails work. The business case of buying email lists and spamming them is still viable.
One can only imagine the infinitesimal success rate of these email distribution lists but they still pay off.
I got one of these via linked in… I foolishly accepted a connection from someone I did not know, but they were connected to someone I did know.
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Another-Scam-3964599.S.254461876?_mSplash=1
It is interesting to note that the deceased worker always has the same surname as the linked in member they are targeting.
I’d be careful of Linked In. I have no need for it and so don’t actually use it; but I joined, mainly to see what it was about, and I looked up various people I’ve heard of or used to know many years ago, just to see if they were there, with no intention of actually contacting them – and ever since, Linked In keeps raising their names as suggestions for people I might know – and I have found out that one of those people has looked at my profile – so they may somehow find out you looked them up. In some cases, the names were even of people with the same name but different from the one I knew – makes no difference. So I’d suggest people who are concerned about personal privacy or security might want to be careful of Linked In – and very probably other similar sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on – all of them, in my opinion, reprehensibly non-transparent in the exact way they work.