Nigerian scams

Like viruses, the Nigerian lottery scams or confidence tricks always have interesting mutations or variants. What started out originally as hardcopy letters that suddenly arrived in one’s letter boxes, these scams later progressed to emails. Emails are now the main avenues used by these scammers but still, there are inspired twists and turns to attract the attention of unsuspecting people. And despite all the publicity in the media, gullible people still fall for them. If I were you, I’d delete all these scam messages in my inbox. You can never eliminate the scammers.

Here is the latest email scam that I had received just minutes ago. See how the scam works? The message comes in many forms. Some will claim that you have become a substantial beneficiary to an unknown uncle that had died some time ago; some others will claim that they need a conduit to claim money from some bigshot politician in exile; there will be tales of you having won a lottery from somewhere. It’s all so typical. They appeal to your greed and then you fall into their trap. You are asked to remit money to some account as processing charges for the big windfall. And when you do, you can say “bye bye” to your money. It’s that simple, yet people still believe it.

In this particular scam, it purportedly comes from the Microsoft office in the United Kingdom. But it is so full of holes … grammatical mistakes and all that. But the biggest giveaway is the use of a public email address. Why do you contact the Microsoft Security Department with an at-yahoo.co-uk email address? Is Microsoft so hard up that this multi-billion dollar company cannot afford their own domain name?

I hope you know what I’m talking about. So while we cannot eliminate the scams, it’s time that we do something in our own ways to expose these scammers.

Before I go to the images of the email I received, here is an important addendum to what I’ve written above. Former Indonesian president Suharto is dead. Be extra careful of emails that say he has cash stashed away outside Indonesia. He may or may not have this fortune. So, don’t be deceived by scam emails that ask for your help to launder this money. Again, let me warn you: it doesn’t work.

Okay…here are the images of the “Microsoft” email now:

Spurious Microsoft Email 1

Spurious Microsoft Email 2

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