Many of you may have received the following email (or a close facsimile).
From Mr.Abbas Karim.
Ouagadougou,
Burkina Faso.
Dear Friend,
Good
day to you. I must say sorry for interfering into your privacy without
seeking for permission. It's because of urgency of this matter. Firstly,
I am Mr.Abbas Karim a lawyer and personal confidant to Abdullah Senussi
who was the intelligence chief of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. I need your
urgent assistance in transferring the sum of ($39.5) million to your
account within 14 banking days from a bank in Burkina Faso. This money
belongs to my master Abdullah Senussi and was deposited in the bank on
the name of his son. The urgent need for the transfer of this fund is to
avoid confiscation by the Libyan government as they quest the seizure
of every related assets belonging to Late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and
his aides. I am contacting you in a good faith so that the bank will
release the money to you for safe keeping/investments till the release
of my master who is now in custody.
So if you are capable of
receiving this huge amount of money,let me have a positive response from
you via return mail for more personal discussions on how we are going
to go about it.
Best.Regards,
Mr.Abbas Karim.
When I was a work some days I could get up to ten or eleven of these. Some told me that a distant relative died in a plane crash and left ten million dollars languishing in a bank in Nigeria, some said that they were the mother/wife/daughter of a recently deposed leader and were being held captive and just wanted me to take as much of the money as I wanted and donate the rest to charity. While others wanted to get to know me and my family (those ones were creepy). At one point I started keeping track of exactly how much money I would have if all those offers were real, it turned out that I would be a multi-billionaire within the year.
But as time has been progressing, and more and more people finally get that these are scams, these emails have been slowing down. It's sort of sad in a way. It feels like an era is coming to an end. Goodbye Mrs Momba-momba, see you later General Abdullah, adios Princess Saridini.
But fear not, I'm pretty sure as I write this there are some talented crooks at work trying to come up with the next great scam. I just have to make sure that when I get it I will remember the old adage, if it seems to good to be true it probably is.
I got a great one from Ban-Ki Moon, saying that they'd just finished a 7 month long meeting and the UN decided to give me this money. Between the bablefish choice of language translation, the abissmal punctuation, and the pathetic spelling and word choices, I find them incredibly funny... But yes I don't get them as frequently as I used to.
ReplyDeleteSome of my favourite ones were the ones from high officials whose grasp on English left much to be desired. I wish I would have kept some that I had posted on my bulletin board at work. They were a scream.
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