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Scam Week 2010
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You won the lottery! Just kidding… but you are very close. Wire $10,000 to my account in Estonia and the King of Prussia will authorize me to immediately transfer into your account a payment of 10.000.000.000! I need the wire transfer in order to get your bank information. So please send it soonest.
If you believed any of that (I hope you didn’t) then you definitely need to check out our series this week – Scam Week.
Scam Week will focus on some of the most popular financial scams on the Internet from the classics, Nigerian 419 and phishing scams, to the new, I barely know you on Facebook but I got mugged in England and need money; with tips on how to avoid falling for a scam or becoming the vehicle for scammers to rip off your friends.
Hopefully I’ll introduce a scam, or at least the history of a scam, that you haven’t seen before and can protect yourself against it!
(Photo: jepoirrier)
{ 8 comments, please add your thoughts now! }Related Posts
 By Jim |
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This should be very interesting. I’m looking forward to it. I personally know of some elderly people who have been taken in by scams.
I am excited for this series, just a few days ago, I got an email from an Old Professor from college. One that I really enjoyed and respected, it was a scam saying he was robbed in England and needed help paying the Hotel bill. As ridiculous as it sounds people fall for these. Here is are some tips on how to recognize these scams.
1. Check for spelling errors, or poor grammar.
2. If this person is someone you barley know why would they be coming to you? THEY WOULDN’T!!!!
3. If it sounds to bad to be true it probably is. The Bill was close to 3,000 dollars, so unless he was there for 2 months or was in a 5 star hotel i am curious how the bill was so high?
Something I never understood is why the scam emails always have bad spelling/grammar. Are all scammers really that dumb or non-native English speakers? But even a dumb person could press a spell check button. And I’d think there must be some smart American scammers too (but maybe they only target specific people or have other more lucrative scams). Or, are the spelling errors made on purpose, so that the scammer knows that anyone who responds to him must be extremely dumb and easy to take advantage of?
Yeah – I’ve always thought the same thing. Cutting corners on the most important aspects seems amateurish. It would be like a counterfeiter using the wrong shade of green in their phony bills.
You’d think they could outsource the proofreading. Seriously, slip someone a twenty and get the job done correctly.
As a baiter, I can tell you that this is one of the best signs. The reason it’s so poor is that the scammers are almost exclusively non-english-speakers to start with, and likely have to teach themselves english to do it. Hence the poor grammar and spelling.
I got a great one today – a Nigerian warning me about all the other scammers in his country. He also had a big inheritance that would need foreign help to retrieve and cost money to do so, but he didn’t want money for that, oh no! He wanted financial support for his business because he’s different from all those other bad guys.
Several years ago my company got an ad from a scammer that was a copy of one we were using. Funny part about it is that the scam copy had a spelling error in it. We laughed at first but then stopped when we realized that our copy had the same spelling error.
Funny world.
Bill snider
Always be on the lookout!