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