From: charlse soludo
Reply-To: charlse soludo
To: kavitch12@yahoo.co.uk
Date: Aug 25, 2005 3:17 AM
FROM THE DESK OF THE EXECUTIVE GOVERNOR
CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA.
PROF.CHARLES SOLUDO
ATTN:Please,
YOUR IMMEDIATE OVER DUE CONTRACT PAYMENT.
From the records of outstanding contractors due for payment with the federal government of Nigeria
your name and company was discovered as next on the list of the outstanding contractors who have not received their payments.
I wish to inform you that your payment is being processed and will be released to you as soon as you respond to this letter. Also note that from my record in my file your outstanding contract payment is us$10.7 million dollars(Ten million seven hundred thousand united states dollars).
Please re-confirm to me if this is inline with what you have in your record and also re-confirm to me the followings
1) Your full name.
2) Phone, fax and mobile #.
3) Company name, position and address.
4) Profession, age and marital status.
As soon as this information’s are received, your payment will be made to you in a certified bank draft from central bank of Nigeria and a copy will be given to you for you to take to your bank and confirm it.
You must call me on my direct number as soon as you receive this letter for a serious discussion with me and also get back to me immedaitely through my alternative Via E-mail. central_bank_of_nigeriaoo98
Regards,
PROF CHARLES SOLUDO.
Executive Governor, Central Bank Of Nigeria.
—
I didn`t even know I HAD a company. But anyway, sure, here are the details you need…
1) Your full name.
Gofuckyourself Suckmeoff (Yeah, my parents are from Russia too)
2) Phone, fax and mobile #. (one number for all)
555-455H013
3) Company name, position and address.
Dilhole Inc.
Jerkoff street 23
Position…hm…not good at biology, but I would suggest somewhere in the waist area.
4) Profession, age and marital status.
Porn star, 87, married, twice divorced.
Now when do I get my moneyyyy???
And what`s with Nigeria, man?
Hilarious 🙂
Poking fun at Nigerian scammers is quite a popular sport. Some people like to engage in correspondence with them, often with hilarious results. Here are some of my favourite sites in that genre: link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4.
I think there was a guy who received spam letters from the “whole family”. First it was the widow, asking him to help her transfer funds from her dead husband. Then the son, the daughter and finally the dead man himself. The thing that puzzles me the most is “Are these things actually hand-written? Or is there a spam-nigerian-letter generator?”
Cause if they are hand-written…who in their right mind is crazy enough to do such a thing? And expect a feedback?
Well, I guess that the scam still succeeds at least occasionally, otherwise the scammers would have given up by now. But it is probably true that the golden age of the Nigerian scam is past. The scam e-mails are now so numerous and so many people are aware of them that the chances of still finding a naive enough recipient are small; in particular, the chances of finding a naive small businessman willing to wire the really big bucks (e.g. on the order of tens of thousands of dollars) are smaller now than they used to be before the scam became so widely known.
As for being hand-written — many of them are, but then each letter is sent to a large number of people (and will be reused several times later, being sent to new and new batches of recipients), and with some luck will draw at least a few responses, so that writing the letter wasn’t a total waste of time. Another practice is for scammers to use “form letters”, which are probably mostly sent by low-level scammers who bought the form letter from someone slightly higher up in the scammer hierarchy; the form letters are sometimes filled in incorrectly, with hilarious results (“I am Mr. $10 million, and would like to send you the sum of John Doe”).
The practice of starting with the widow and then being “passed on” to some other correspondent (who may either be the same scammer, or a more experienced one, who gets to handle the correspondence while the first one was just sending out the initial letters) is quite common. Often the new correspondent will be a son or a lawyer/barrister. See also this link for a possible explanation.
The scammers often handle multiple correspondences at the same time, impersonating different people with different background stories (different dead presidents, corrupt oil company officials, etc.), and so sometimes confuse the details (hence you can get letters from the dead man, or the barrister’s name changes once or twice in the process, etc.).