DEAR FRIEND

[Zacariaz]

yusuf musa <[email protected]>

DEAR FRIEND,

I KNOW THAT THIS MESSAGE WILL COME TO YOU AS A SURPRISE. I AM THE BILL AND EXCHANGE MANAGER IN BANK OF AFRICA (BOA), OUAGADOUGOU BURKINA FASO. I HOPED THAT YOU WILL NOT EXPOSE OR BETRAY THIS TRUST AND CONFIDENT THAT I AM ABOUT TO REPOSE ON YOU FOR THE MUTUAL BENEFIT OF OUR FAMILIES.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/859479.stm
I NEED YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE IN TRANSFERRING THE SUM OF (USD$25) MILLION TO YOUR ACCOUNT WITHIN 10 TO 14 BANKING DAYS. THIS MONEY HAS BEEN DORMANT FOR YEARS IN OUR BANK WITHOUT CLAIM. I WANT THE BANK TO RELEASE THE MONEY TO YOU AS THE NEAREST PERSON TO OUR DECEASED CUSTOMER (THE OWNER OF THE ACCOUNT) DIED ALONG WITH HIS SUPPOSED NEXT OF KIN IN AN AIR CRASH SINCE JULY, 2000.
I DON'T WANT THE MONEY TO GO INTO OUR BANK TREASURER ACCOUNT AS AN ABANDONED FUND. SO THIS IS THE REASON WHY I CONTACTED YOU SO THAT THE BANK CAN RELEASE THE MONEY TO YOU AS THE NEXT OF KIN TO THE DECEASED CUSTOMER. PLEASE I WOULD LIKE YOU TO KEEP THIS PROPOSAL AS A TOP SECRET AND DELETE IT IF YOU ARE NOT INTERESTED.
UPON RECEIPT OF YOUR REPLY, I WILL GIVE YOU FULL DETAILS ON HOW THE BUSINESS WILL BE EXECUTED AND ALSO NOTE THAT YOU WILL HAVE 30% OF THE ABOVE MENTIONED SUM IF YOU AGREE TO HANDLE THIS BUSINESS WITH ME? AND 10% WILL BE SET ASIDE FOR ANY EXPENSES THAT WARRANT ON THE PROCESS BEFORE THE FUND GET INTO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT SUCH AS TELEPHONE CALLS BILLS (ETC).

BEST REGARD.
MR YUSUF MUSA.

I am still not through laughing.
"I AM THE BILL AND EXCHANGE MANAGER IN BANK OF AFRICA (BOA)" i write in capital letters and use a french hotmail account. Oh, and by the way i want to hand over to you the sum of 25 million dollars.

I have seen alot of these mails, but never this bad. How stupid do they think people are?

I have actually replyed to one or two of these mails, not that i believed a single word of it, but because i thought they had done a good job in trying to scam me and deserved a reply I have never gotten a reply back tough...

Anyway, just wanted to share the "experience"

[AndrewAPrice]

10% set aside for telephone bills? I've never heard about anyone having a $2.5 million telephone bill.

[Solar]

Easy calculation.

Cost of writing the mail: Five minutes' time. (Though I don't understand why they don't ask someone with better English skills to write the letter, it would make them much more believable.)

Cost of sending the mail to millions of recipients: Five minutes at an internet café. (All they need is an open SMTP portal, of which there are unfortunately far too many still.)

Means, even if one person is stupid enough to send, say, 50 dollars to pay for some alleged bribe or something (as is bound to happen in the next "round" of the scam), that's 50 dollars net income.

Add to that the fact that 50 dollars might not sound much to many here, but is several month's salaries for hard labor in some parts of the world.


Bottom result, those mails will continue to clutter our inboxes until at least one of the things below is done:

• closing all open SMTP portals on the internet (hopeless),
• charging a token amount of money per e-mail sent (hopeless),
• extending the SMTP protocol to require a message hash for the message plus the receiver's mail address (almost hopeless).

Point 1) would be the cleanest solution, but it's much too easy to screw up a server's configuration.

Point 2) and 3) both aim at killing the business case for mass mailers, but both would require international agreement, and make life difficult for all the relay servers on the web which we use - basically - for free when sending mail.

A very easy way would be to provide a PGP public key, and make it well known that you decline to even acknowledge any mail that is not at least hashed with your public key. (That's effectively point 3) above on a private level.)

But since there's no newsletter, mailing list etc. supporting encrypted / hashed mailings, and most users on the net couldn't be bothered with encryption software if their life (or rather, personal freedom) depended on it...



Yep, I'm in a depressed mood right now.

[Zacariaz]

yes you are depressed...
anyway, youre right as usual, however the point was not why the try to scam people, while it might not be vey honorably, i can surely understand it, but why write in capital letters fx.? I doesnt exactly look proffesional. Even i could come up with a better scam and i have zero imagination. why use an email address which gives you away?
and the list goes on...

Point being: I have seens some prety good ones in my time and i have nearly been fooled once or twice, but this cant fool anyone...

[pcmattman]

Problem is, it does scam people.

Google "nigerian scam"

[Brynet-Inc]

I rarely get spam emails, simply because I rarely distribute my email address

But it's annoying when it does happen.. spammers should be jailed.. or shot.. mood depending

[Alboin]

I rarely get spam emails, simply because I rarely distribute my email address

Same here. I wonder why people just freely give away their email address. It's not as if you'd print your address on the back of your shirt...

I'm more annoyed by some of the 'free' services online that make you give them your email so they can send you a 'response'. Oh, and did they forget to tell you that their selling it as well? Yeeeaaahhh. I thought not.

[JackScott]

I've always found that the worst spammers in my inbox are actually ACM (the association of computing machinery). They get sending a lot of email to try and get me to renew my membership. I can't opt out of the mail, because I don't have a membership anymore. :S

[t0xic]

You guys should look up scambaiting =]

[os64dev]

well that is funny but somewhat dangerous too..