The Ridiculous Rise Of Fake Lottery Winner Scams

In the past four years an very particular type of scam has come into existence from the "criminal masterminds" in Nigeria (and Ghana, and Benin Republic, and Côte D'Ivoire, etc. etc.) in which they now consistently claim to be the winner of one or another lottery who has decided to give away their winnings to you, of course, who they've never met, and who they are now emailing out of the blue.

On an average day I receive no fewer than 18 - 24 of these stupid scam messages. I've written about one previously, the David Dawes scam. That was back in April of 2012, but that hasn't stopped the morons from Nigeria (and Ghana, and Benin, and Côte D'Ivoire) from trying to run the same stupid scam to this very day.

This of course indicates that the scam is obviously working, and unwitting recipients are sending these scammers their money, or else it wouldn't still be so prevalent some four years later.

The most frequently-spammed versions of this set of scams are always claiming to be one of the following (from the first attempts in 2010 to the present day in June 2014):

• Allen and Violet Large
• David Dawes
• Gareth and Catherine Bull
• Cindy and Mark Hill
• Adrian and Gillian Bayford
• and Colin and Chris Weir
• Tom Crist
• Neil Trotter

There are others, but these are the most common ones.

In the coming week I'll be taking a close look at each of these, and eplain in each case why it became a scam, wht it still persists, how you can tell it's a scam, and why I believe this is easily the stupidest type of scams these morons from Africa have come up with yet.

In each case, the scam itself originated because of a news story - usually one that broke internationally - that heralded the generosity of one or another lottery winner, giving away significant portions of their winnings. In nearly every case, these news stories originated in the UK, where a large number of Nigerian scammers live and operate, or possibly a member of the family of a Nigerian scammer who lived in the UK saw the story and got the bright idea that this was a new scam message they could start pumping into circulation.

From there it became easier and easier to discover the news story talking about the giveaway, but nearly no news stories at all about how the winners were suddenly being misrepresented by stupid scammers in Western Africa. That is only now beginning to change.

As with any stupid Nigerian scam (is there any other kind?) they're unfortunately still effective, because these scammers are targeting the dumbest, most uneducated, most ignorant members of internet society. Out of lists of millions of recipients they know that 99.999998% of all of their recipients will know better (assuming they even see it, since every single one of these messages is instantly flagged as spam on all email providers but Hotmail) but that remaining 0.0000002% of recipients consiste of people whoh are unfortunately dumb enough to fall for this, and they'll fall fast. This very small population of scam message recipients don't appear to research anything when they receive the message, they just reply immediately. They don't appear to have critical thinking. They often appear to be desperate, or somehow lacking in mental faculties - but they still somehow have money, which they immediately begin sending to these scammers.

I'm posting this series because I'm hoping that readers of this series will think about someone they may know that they care about who might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, and who might not be bright enough to really question the content of one of these messages, and will step in and stop them from continuing to send this money overseas to these stupid criminals.

So join me as I tell the stories of these lucky but unwitting winners and their stories since they won, and the scams that have been perpetrated in their names.

Thanks for reading.

SiL / IKS / concerned citizen

Help Shut Down Stupid Nigerian Scammers This Holiday

As the Holidays approach, we spam investigators notice a very sharp increase in stupid Nigerian scams. This has been going on for several years now, but the volume for the last quarter of 2013 is significantly higher than previous years.

Based on anecdotal evidence from readers who contacted me specifically regarding the onslaught of Nigerian scam spam messages over the past three years, the volume of ridiculous Nigerian scam messages now outweighs all other spam messaging by a factor of anywhere from 3 to 1 to 8 to 1. One contact says he regularly sees (and reports) over 120 Nigerian scams every day. This is a ridiculous state of affairs of course. Scams might be more believable if a person received just one of them a month instead of one every 20 minutes, especially if the same scam wasn't repeated every single day. I have seen far more than 8 - 10 "Western Union" scam messages come through in a mere two hours. That's stupid. Nobody in their right mind would ever believe Western Union has 8 to 10 distinct "compensations" of millions of dollars each in a two hour period.

The problem, of course, is that while you (the reader of an anti-spam blog) and I will know well enough that these are obvious scams, there is a segment of the population that unfortunately isn't that bright, and they will believe they're actually talking to somebody from Western Union, or Robert Mueller from the FBI, or a representative of the UN, or the IMF, etc. etc. These are the ripe targets that the scammers are going after.

So in an attempt to spread a little Christmas preventive measures, I would like to submit that if you receive these scam messages, and they're high in volume, rather than "just deleting" them, or letting your spam filters capture and hide their messages (which they tend to do pretty easily since they're literally always the same message copy), instead consider reporting a percentage of them every day.

I created the Nigerian Scamerator™ several years ago and it is a very, very effective tool at shutting down scammer email accounts. You can download a copy here. I've also been in pretty regular contact with all of the abuse teams of every major free-email provider in the world regarding this abuse. All of the major email providers are pretty quick at shutting these offending accounts down, with special mention going to Hotmail and Gmail, who often shut the criminal accounts down within mere minutes of the report.

You'll be stopping criminals in their tracks, and stopping unwitting victims from ever starting the conversation with these moron criminals. It feels good!

Please think of the less knowledgable victims of Nigerian scams this holiday season. They aren't going to seek out an article like this, and they won't realize it's a scam. That doesn't mean they deserve to be scammed any more than you do.

David Dawes Doesn't Have Money For You Either

Hello again.

Today I wanted to talk about the "David Dawes" scam which has been making the rounds since at least October of 2011.

In this scam, the idiot criminal who sends the spam message wants you to believe that he is David Dawes of the UK, who is giving away his lottery winnings to you and thousands of other complete strangers.

David Dawes is a real person, and he really did win the UK National Lottery in October 2011.

Here's a link which is commonly posted in these scam messages which is a real news story about the win:

£101m lottery jackpot winners Dave and Angela Dawes to give millions to friends and family

The key paragraph in this news story is as follows:

But along with treats for themselves, they have decided to share their luck with up to 20 close friends and family, giving each a million pounds.

That's twenty (20) close friends, not thousands of complete strangers.

The news media are well aware of the existence of this scam.

A spokesman for the lottery that the Dawes won back in October 2011 has spoken on the record, stating that this type of ridiculous scam message is 100% false, and that they have no plans to share their winnings with millions of strangers via email:

http://petchonka.com/lottery-email-scam-targets-euromillions-winners-dave-and-angie-dawes/

Spokesman for the UK lottery organization Camelot Simon Horne confirmed the emails are not from Dave or Angie Dawes and those who receive such a message need to proceed with caution.

This is OBVIOUSLY a scam, and should be ignored, or - better yet - you can report their email addresses to their providers, which are always a free email provider like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail. You can do this very easily by using my handy Nigerian ScamerAtor™ tool. You can grab that here:

http://bit.ly/TxcMqc

Believe me: it works. The scammers hate this tool. The email providers you report to will often shut the offending accounts down within the same day you report them.

Here is a recent example of this idiotic, obvious scam message. In particular I love that the subject is usually "This is a personal email directed to you", as if the function of putting an email address in the "to" field of a new message was to send it to someone completely different than the recipient.

You're welcome.

SiL

Subject: This is a personal email directed to you...
Reply-To: davedaweas@yahoo.cn
Mail-Reply-To: davedaweas@yahoo.cn

-- Dear friend,

This is a personal email directed to you. I am Dave Dawes, my
fiancee andI won a Jackpot Lottery of 101 million pounds
($156 million) inOctober, and have voluntarily decided to
donate the sum of 1 millionpounds ($1.56 million) to you as
part of our own charity project toimprove the lot of 5
unknown lucky individuals all over the world plus 15close
friends and family. If you have received this email then you
areone of the lucky recipients and all you have to do is get
back to us sothat we can send your details to the delivery
courier company.

You can verify this by visiting the web pages below.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8820
740/101m-lottery-jackpot-winners-Dave-and-Angela-Dawes-to-gi
ve-millions-to-friends-and-family.html

Best of luck,

Dave Dawes.Email: davedaweas@yahoo.cn

Robert S. Mueller from the FBI and the "Anti Terrorist And Monetrary Crimes Division"

Hello at last. It's been a while.

In the interests of making this blog more of a resource for those who are unclear about whether an email they received is legitimate or not, I thought it was worth posting some of the bigger examples of scams which should be easier to identify as scams, but for some reason are still accepted as believable by a chunk of the public. That this scam is still in use in 2011 says to me that people are still falling for it, and don't appear to be aware of what's wrong with these messages and why they should be avoided at all costs.

One of the most common scams out there, which has been going on for many years now, is the FBI "anti terrorist and monetrary crimes division" scam.

Every week (in fact as of this writing, it's nearly every single day) I receive one of these messages.

The moron Nigerian criminal and / or their Russian counterpart who wrote the bait message in the first place, take great pains in trying to convince the recipient that the message is from the FBI - specifically from Robert S. Mueller, the director of the FBI - despite the fact that the response email address is universally a throwaway email address hosted by one or another free-email provider (Hotmail, GMail, AOL, Yahoo, etc.)

Result: This is absolutely a scam.

Message Claims:

• The message claims to come directly from Robert S. Mueller, the director of the FBI
• It claims that there is (of course) a very large sum of money which for some reason is being reserved for you in a secured bank account.
• It claims that the FBI has previously attempted to contact you regarding this money, and now they require a response and identification to begin the transfer of these funds to your bank account.
• The message always uses a free-email account as the reply address, or it is explicitly mentioned in the message body itself.
• The message is usually full of confusing language about how much money there is being held, how it transferred from which bank to which bank, etc. This is meant to sound official and confuse the recipient into thinking this scammer knows what he's talking about. It is all nonsense.

Actual FBI Website:

http://www.fbi.org/

Does the alleged Robert Mueller ever include an email address hosted at fbi.org?

NO (High scam score)

Google count for scam reports of this message:

For the phrase "So to this regards you are to re-assure and proof to us that what you are about to receive is a clean money by sending to us FBI Identification Record":

http://bit.ly/ejI0Zi

[1,570 results]

For the phrase "The FBI Criminal Justice Information.Services (CJIS) Division processes these requests to check illegal activities in uk and united states.":

http://bit.ly/g0H3cw

[90 results]

This means that you are not the only one receiving this message. If it was so important that this remain a secret, why are there over 1,500 others with the same message, openly posted on the internet?

Why this should be considered a scam:

Here is the wikipedia entry on Robery S. Mueller:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller

You can see that he has been the director of the FBI since he was appointed in 2001.

Nowhere on that entry is there any mention of a "monetary crimes division" in the FBI. In fact you can try searching for that exact phrase (in quotes) in Google, and the only thing tat will be returned is thousands of pages of these scam messages. Not one result will be from the actual FBI. That's because there is no such division, and never has been.

The message may refer to one or another division of the government of Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe or Ghana. It will describe "diplomatic payments" which have been transferred. The funds in these transfers have something to do with "terrorist activities", but they don't describe it further.

Another really ridiculous statement is that one or another bank in Nigeria, Kenya, (etc.) is somehow incapable of handling this transfer directly, which is utterly wrong, since banks perform wire transfers several billions of times per day, every day. Instead they want you to contact the FBI (Robert Mueller himself!) and provide personal identification documents, and the FBI will credit your account. In that last segment they typically reference a "reliable" US or UK bank. (e.g. "jp morgan chase" - note the lack of capitalization.)

Here is a picture of my favorite message I received this week:

Take a look at that. They're actually using the Comic Sans font. Comic Sans is perhaps the most universally disliked font in the world today. An elderly grandmother might choose it to send a witty birthday greeting to their 9 year old granddaughter. Ask yourself: Would Robert S. Mueller, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, use Comic Sans to send a message of such an allegedly secure and private nature?

Further: would the director of the FBI have to resort to using a Hotmail account for what is purportedly FBI business? Of course not! He has his own address on the fbi.org email server.

There is usually some sort of deadline on this fund transfer. It is, of course, also nonsense. If you replied to it weeks or months past that alleged deadline, the scammers on the other end would tell you you "just made it" or are still somehow eligible.

Evidence that this is indeed a scam (besides the obvious notion that Robert Mueller is not in the business of randomly emailing recipients of large sums of money using a Hotmail account and written in Comic Sans.):

Scam Radar, Dec. 8, 2008
Fraud Watchers, Sept. 16, 2009

Message body:

Anti-terrorist and monetary crimes division
FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Federal bureau of investigation
J. Edgar Hoover building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20535-0001
Ref: FBI/JU/25/2011

Attention: Fund Beneficiary,

This is an official advice from the FBI foreign remittance/telegraphic dept.,it has come to our notice that a bank from Nigeria district has released Ten Million united states dollars into Bank of America in your name as the beneficiary, by Inheritance means.The C.B.N bank Nigeria knowing fully well that they do not have enough facilities to effect this payment from the united kingdom to your account,used what we know as a secret diplomatic transit payment S.T.D.P to pay this fund through wire transfer, they used this means to complete the payment.

They are still, waiting for confirmation from you on the already transferred funds, which was made in direct transfer so that they can do final crediting to your account. Secret diplomatic payments are not made unless the funds are related to terrorist activities why must your payment be made in secret transfer, if your transaction is legitimate, if you are not a terrorist, then why did you not receive the money directly into your account, this is a pure coded, means of payment .Records, which we have had with, this method of payment in the past has always been related to terrorist acts, we do not want you to get into trouble as soon as these funds reflect in your account, so it is our duty as a world wide commission to correct this little problem before this fund will be credited into your personal account.

Due to the increased difficulty and unnecessary scrutiny by the uk authorities when funds come from outside of Europe, and the Middle East, the F.B.I bank commission for Europe has stopped the transfer on its way to deliver payment of Ten Million united states dollars to debit your reserve account and pay you through a secured diplomatic transit account (S.D.T.A). We govern and oversee fundsTransfer for the World Bank and the rest of the world. We advice you contact us immediately, as the funds have been stopped and are being held in our custody, until you can be able to provide us with a diplomatic immunity seal of transfer (dist) within three days from the world local bank that authorize the transfer from where the funds was transferred from to certify that the funds that you are about to receive from Nigeria are antiterrorist/drug free or we shall have cause to cross and impound the payment, we shall release the funds immediately we receive this legal documents .

------------------------------ ------------------------------ --------------------

We have decided to contact you directly to acquire the proper verifications and proof from you to show that you are the rightful person to receive this fund, because of the amount involve,we want to make sure is a clean and legal money you are about to receive. Be informed that the fund are now in United kingdom in your name , but right now we have ask the bank not to release the fund to anybody that comes to them , unless we ask them to do so, because we have to carry out our investigations first before releasing the fund to you. Note that the fund is in the jp morgan chase right now, but we have ask them not to credit the fund to you yet, because we need a solid proof and verifications from you before releasing the funds.

So to this regards you are to re-assure and proof to us that what you are about to receive is a clean money by sending to us FBI Identification Record and also Diplomatic Immunity Seal Of Transfer(DIST) to satisfy to us that the money your about to receive is legitimate and real money. You are to forward the documents to us immediately if you have it in your possession, if you don?t have it let us know so that we will direct and inform you where to obtain the document and send to us so that we will ask the bank holding the funds the jp morgan chase to go ahead Crediting your account immediately.

This Documents are to be issued to you from the World Local Bank that Authorized the transfer, so get back to us immediately if you dont have the document so that we will inform you the particular place to obtain the document because we have come to realize that the fund was Authorized by the bank that initialized the transfer Identification Record and Diplomatic Immunity Seal Of Transfer(DIST) often referred to as a Criminal History Record or Rap Sheet, is a listing of certain information taken from fingerprint submissions retained by the FBI in connection with arrests and, in some instances, federal employment,naturalization, or military service. These conditions is Valid until 2nd of March 2011 after we shall take actions on canceling the payment and then charge you for illegally moving funds out of Nigeria. Guarantee: funds will be released on confirmation of the document.

------------------------------ ------------------------------ --------------------
Final instruction:
60f Credit payment instruction: irrevocable credit guarantee
61e Beneficiary has full power when validation is cleared
62 Beneficiaries bank in uk. can only release funds-
62 Upon confirmation from the world bank/united nations.
64 Bearers must clear bank protocol and validation request
------------------------------ ------------------------------ -------------------

NOTE: We have asked for the above documents to make available the most complete and up-to date records possible for the enhancement of public safety,welfare and security of Society while recognizing the importance of individual privacy rights.. If you fail to provide the Documents to us, we will charge you with the FBI and take our proper action against you for not proofing to us the legitimate of the fund you are about to receive.

The United States Department of Justice Order 556-73 establishes rules and regulations for the subject of an FBI Identification Record to obtain a copy of his or her own Record for review. The FBI Criminal Justice Information.Services (CJIS) Division processes these requests to check illegal activities in uk and united states.An individual may request a copy of his or her own FBI Identification record for personal review or to challenge information on the Record. Other reasons an individual may request a copy of his or her own Identification Record may include international adoption or to satisfy a requirement to live or work in a foreign country or receive funds from another country (i.e.,Diplomatic Immunity Seal Of Transfer, letter of good conduct, criminal history background,etc.)

FBI Director
Robert S. Mueller, III

As always: stay far away. If someone you know has received this message and is taking it seriously, point them to this blog.

Additionally: as with 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 will often shut the offending accounts down within the same day you report them.

Stay safe out there...

SiL / IKS / concerned citizen

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