As my post on Sam Mendoza SMS Scam is getting a some attention (and lots of comments too 🙂 ), I will be posting another variant of scam and this time its email scam. I got it from my free email account recently and I am sharing the as an awareness campaign to all readers of this blog.

It is very classic 419 Fraud/Nigerian Scam, read on…

Subject: Confidential Respond.

Message content:
Confidential Respond.

Good day!
I am Mr.Dan Maha director auditing and accounting department” bank of Africa (boa) Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso .I discovered the sum of seven million, two hundred thousand dollars (usd7.2) belonging to a deceased customer of this bank the fund has been lying in a suspense account without anybody coming to put claim over the money since the account owner late, Mr Salla khat from Lebanese who was involved in the December 28th 2006 Benin car crash.

it is therefore, upon this discovery that i decided to take this ultimatum and make this business proposal to you as the fund will be release to you as the next of kin or relation to the deceased for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is coming for it and i don’t want this money to go into the bank treasury as unclaimed bill the banking rules here stipulates that if such money remained unclaimed after five years, the money will be transferred into the bank treasury as unclaimed fund. The request of foreigner as next of kin in this business is occasioned by the fact that the deceased customer was a foreigner and a Burkina be cannot stand as next of kin to a foreigner.

Therefore, I am soliciting for your assistance to come forward as the next of kin. I have agreed that 40% of this money will be for you as the beneficiary respect of the provision of your account and service rendered, 60% will be for me. Then immediately the money transferred to your account from this bank, I will proceed to your country for the sharing of the fund. Call me through my telephone: +226 xxx yy zz.

Yours faithful,
Mr.Dan Maha.

Nigerian Scam or 419 Fraud is a classic email scam. The usual modus operandi is like: scammer sends email to unsuspecting users describing some big amount of money or inheritance left by someone who died (usually in a foreign country) and does not have immediate relatives/kin to claim the inheritance. The scammer will try to persuade the future victim to pretend to be a relative of the dead person and claim the inheritance and afterwards they split the supposed inheritance between the scammer and the claimer. The scammer will ask the future victim to send them money to facilitate transfer and other procedures and as a token of trust. But the heart of the scam is that after the victim send the money to the scammer, they will be gone forever… poof!

To give some *credit* to the scammer, the english language and grammar is a lot better now, but the punctuation and capitalization sucks (You scammy guys should do more QA before sending this scam again). But sadly they send it to the wrong person and I’m exposing it here as another EPIC FAIL Nigerian Scam.

In my opinion here some key learnings with Nigerian scams:

• Awareness is the key. Be aware of email scams and its different variations.
• If the deal seems too good to be true then be suspicious and consult your family and your friends about it.
• If you suspect that it’s a scam, don’t reply to the email and don’t entertain future emails with similar offer.
• Report to authorities as you deem proper.

I will add more tips, email samples, and other helpful links against email scam (and spam) here in my blog in the future.