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"I am Engr Moses Ekpen a director in the budget
and planning department of the Federal Ministry of Petroleum and Natural
Resources (FMPNR), I had a seven man Tenders Board Committee in charge of
contract award and Payment approvals. I came to know of you in my search for a
reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential transaction, which
involves the transfer of a huge sum of money to a foreign account."
Or
"I am Mrs. Mariam Abacha, the widow of Gen.
Sani Abacha, The Late Nigerian Military Head of State. You were introduced to me
through the Chamber of Commerce. I am presently in distress and under House
arrest while my son Mohammed is undergoing trial in Lagos and Abuja. He is
presently detained in prison custody. The government has frozen all the family
account and auctioned all our properties.
To save the family from total bankruptcy I have
managed to ship to Europe and Asia through a Shipping company, the sum of US20,
000,000.00 respectively kept by my late husband."
The essence of these emails are also basically
the same – the person although does not know you, thanks to your business
reputation, has decided to contact you with a very confidential proposal to
transfer a mind boggling amount of money from his country to any foreign land.
There could be numerous stories but the bottom
line is they require your help to transfer the amount. For your service they
will promise you something from 10 to 40% of the whole amount. There would be a
telephone no or an email address to contact the person.
You may wonder how they swindle people.
There are various ways that the crooks rip off
their victims. Some of the most commons ones of them are described below:
| They will ask you to open a bank account under
their name. On their second step, they will ask you to deposit a sum of say US$
10000 to that account, explaining if the account does not have any decent
amount, the officials those who are responsible for transferring the promised
millions of dollars would become suspicious and won’t authorize the transaction.
Once you deposited the asked sum, they simply withdraw it and disappear. Usually
they choose a bank where they might have some connections. So you, after losing
your money, do not get any help from the bank either. They will ask you to send some merchandize or
gifts for the officials they need to bribe in order to make the transactions of
the assumed millions of dollars smoothly. Naturally, you never hear from them
once you sent the requested gifts to their address.
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We even heard stories like this one: A man was
persuaded to come to Nigeria to look after the transaction by himself. Over
there he was kept hostage until he shifted all his liquid assets to the thugs.
Looking at the increasing quantity of scam
emails that we receive, this only convinces that many fall for this seemingly
simple trap. According to FBI these swindlers have defrauded millions of dollars
from gullible people.
There could be other variations of this scam,
next time you read an email that feels suspicious, just delete it! There are
other ways of making money!
Some words of cautions! Although most of these
scams originate from African countries, please do not generalize and consider
that all companies form these countries are bad. As usual a few people are
responsible for tarnishing the reputation of a country.
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