ICB Bank of Ghana - $3.5 Million Dollars in a dormant account

Date logged: 5/30/2010 3:28:28 PM EDT

Result: This is absolutely a scam. You should ignore and delete this message if you received it. You should also, if you like, report them to the appropriate free-email provider.

Message Claims:

• Claims to be from an employee of the International Commercial Bank in Ghana or Accra-Ghana
• Claims that there is a bank account for a deceased person (different name every time) containing from $1 million to (usually) $3.5 million US dollars.
• Claims that he is ready to transfer these funds to the recipient's bank account pending a reply to (always) a free email service such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail. (High scam score)

Actual bank website:

www.icbank-gh.com

Actual bank contact page / email address:

http://www.icbank-gh.com/contactinfo.php

enquiry@icbank-gh.com

Does the alleged employee ever mention the bank's actual contact information in their message? NO (High scam score)

Further: ICB Bank in Ghana does not list any Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail accounts as legitimate contact email addresses. (High scam score)

Note: I have a request in with the actual ICB Bank in Ghana, so that I can post their official policy regarding how they actually handle accounts of deceased persons, and to further explain why these messages should never be considered legitimate in any way.

Google count for scam reports of this message:

For the phrase "Pardon me for not having the pleasure of knowing your mindset before making you this offer as it is"

http://bit.ly/cfoN0w

[13 results]

For the phrase "by my branch office the International Commercial Bank which I am the manager"

http://bit.ly/b2tTCI

[Thousands of results.] (High scam score)

Why this should be considered a scam:

• Unless they are a criminal, or engaging in purely illegal activity, a bank employee will never randomly contact large numbers of individuals to randomly claim there is an excess that they are somehow eligible to receive.
• No such "excess" should legally be allowed to be transferred to any random stranger. They remain in the bank account.
• It is not up to the bank to discover who the relatives are of a deceased person. It's up to the relative of the deceased person.
• No genuine bank employee will use a free email service such as Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail to contact potential clients, or potential recipients of funds as a part of legitimate bank business.
• If this message is "utterly confidential", why has it been sent to at the very least a dozen recipients in numerous countries, and at the very most thousands of recipients? Confidential means: it's a secret. This message is very widely available to read.

Sophistication of this message: low.

This type of scam has been sent extremely often from 2001 through today (2010.) There are probably millions of these messages being sent every other week to at least several million recipients. There is absolutely no way taht all the millions of people would ever be eligible for such a "deceased funds transfer" for the same allegedly deceased person.

Of course for any Nigerian scam, you can report their contact addresses to their email providers very easily by using my Nigerian ScamerAtor™ which is available here:

http://bit.ly/TxcMqc

Believe me: it works. The scammers hate this tool. The email providers you report to (Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) will often shut the offending accounts down within the same day you report them.

---

From name: Mr. Frank Asamoah

Other from names used while sending this message:

Mr. Frank Wuddah
http://www.mail-archive.com/spip@googlegroups.com/msg00006.html
http://www.romancescam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&p=130437

Mr Konar Gamba
http://spamsiteblog.com/page/3.aspx

Dr. David Mensah
http://spamemailgraveyard.com/2009/08/very-important.html

Mr Marafat .A. Kallonga
http://zoqy.blogspot.com/2010/04/todays-e-mail-scams_14.html

Sample Subject line: Good Day

Response email addresses:
frkasamoah1@yahoo.com.hk
frankasamoah02@terra.com

Other addresses used to send this same message:

mrfrank.m_wudah@aol.in

Message body:

Good Day,

Pardon me for not having the pleasure of knowing your mindset before making you this offer as it is utterly confidential and genuine by virtue of its nature. I write to solicit your assistance in a funds transfer deal involving US$3.5M.

This fund has been stashed out of the excess profit made two years ago by my branch office the International Commercial Bank which I am the manager. I have already submitted an approved end of the year report for the year 2008 to my head office here in Accra-Ghana and they will never know of this excess. I have since then, placed this amount in a Non-Investment Account without a beneficiary.

Upon your response, I will configure your name on our database as holder of the Non-Investment Account. I will then guide you on how to apply to my head office for the Account Closure/ bank-to-bank remittance of the funds to your designated bank account.

If you concur with this proposal, I intend for you to retain 30% of the funds while 70% shall be for me.

Kindly forward your response to: frkasamoah1@yahoo.com.hk

Regards,

Mr. Frank Asamoah.
DISCLAIMER: This e-mail and attachments are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Models & Computers Plus. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this Email in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this Email is strictly prohibited. If this transmission is received in error please notify the sender immediately and delete this message from your E-mail system. All electronic transmissions to and from Models & Computers Plus are recorded and may be monitored.

Nigerian Scam Messages: How do we know they're a scam?

Hello, and welcome to my latest blog specifically addressing Nigerian scam messages.

This scam has existed online for at least ten years now. (I'm writing this in May 2010.) For some reason, many, many recipients are still falling for these scams. They ignore all manner of common sense, and don't take any kind of due diligence regarding the details of the messages. They just assume they're for real, and another Nigerian (or other usually African country's) scammer engages them in an act of cheque fraud.

So how can an average, non-tech-savvy person tell that these messages are a scam?

This is a very common question, asked by thousands of recipients of these very common criminal messages. To those of us who have been researching these messages and the scammers behind them, it's baffling that anyone in their right mind could ever take these messages seriously, or believe that they were not a scam, but so many people still do that it appears a better way of getting the message across.

This blog will document randomly-selected "Nigerian Scam" or "419" spam messages, and apply a score based on reasonable common sense. As of this writing, that algorithm is yet to be decided upon, so for the first several messages, the score will be based purely on elements like:

- How do banks genuinely deal with accounts of a deceased person?
- Would a bank employee ever use a free-email service to perform legitimate bank business? (Hint: no they wouldn't)
- Do any of these lotteries exist? Microsoft Lottery? (no) Toyota Lottery? (no again) Yahoo / MSN lottery? (no again)
- Is any single word of these messages genuine? (That's the tricky part.)

If a message hits within a certain score, or in the early stages, passes a rigorous test of common sense, it can safely be considered to be very close to 100% scam, and should be completely ignored. Better yet: report the account the criminal was using to try to ensnare you into forking over your money. I've reported about how to do this on my other blog. (Read that posting here.)

I've been documenting and tabulating the money I would actually possess if any of the thousands of Nigerian scam messages were true. Of course none of them are. As of this writing, the total money I would actually have from these so-called lotteries, inheritances and funds transfers is well over $50 [b]B[/b]illion US dollars. That's [b]B[/b]illion with a bold, capital [b]B[/b], and that's after less than a year and a half of tabulation. On average I win or inherit $100 million US dollars every single day. There is never a day when I am not informed that I have won or inherited money from a complete stranger, always located in Nigeria or Ghana. It should be clear to anyone that there is no way on earth that this is possible. Absolutely no way. Yet people are still falling for these scams.

This scam has gone on for far too long and deserves to become extremely unprofitable for the criminals trying to dupe everybody into sending money to Nigeria.

Join me as I discover a proper scoring algorithm, and do some real digging into why these messages are so obviously fake, and why you should never, ever assume that someone you've never heard from really does have millions of dollars to send to you, out of the blue.

SiL / IKS / concerned citizen