Here, harvested from my spam filter, are some of the opening lines, beginning with the "lotto scam:"
Contact Mrs. Jyotsna Field.
E.U LOTTO AWARD
NUMBER: 44/42/09-ANL/06
OUR REF: 06/EXD646509/WN
YOUR REF:AD/GU888/68/06.NH.
FINAL NOTICE OF WINNING
We are delighted to notify you of the result of the free lotto E.U programs held on 8th of June,2006 your email address were attached to one of the ten winning Ticket numbers (67-84-50) - with Game (Number 7387).
You have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay out of 750,000.00 euro (Seven Hundred And Fifty Thousand Euro)
CONGRATULATIONS!
All participants were selected through a computer ballot system from our sponsors databases, including over 5,000 companies and 20,000 individual E-mail addresses
and names submitted by our agents drawn from Asia, Africa, Europe, North And South America, Oceania and around the world. To file for your urgent claim, please contact our affiliate agent. [. . . ]
And this over-punctuated variant of the Spanish Prisoner scam:
Good day,
I hope this mail meets you in good health and spirit, I am,Fatimata Abou, a sierra Leonia. Presently, I live as a refugee in republic of Dakar Senegal with my younger Brother, Mashall. I am a victim of war and the daughter of late Chief Dr.Desmond Abou, The assassinated former assistant director of Sierra Leone gold and Diamond Mining Corporation.
My father was killed with other government officials during official Hours when the rebel troops stormed and raided the mining corporation Office at the heat of the crisis in my country. A few weeks later, the Rebels also invaded our residential building in which my mother and two Of our security men were killed in the compound while I was out for a Special research program and my younger Brother was in school.
I had a singular shock and trauma, which compelled us to flee from the Country to republic of Dakar senegal by the help of an army colonel, who is a Close friend
of my late father, I have first degree in marketing and I would have further my education if not for the death of my parents. I have never worked to earn my
living since my late parents had enough Wealth for us.
I am contacting you now because of the present difficulty i am facing. Unfortunately my father's two accounts in West Africa have recently been frozen, however this did not affect the 10.5 Million US Dollars which he deposited with a prime Bank here in
dakar senegal. [ . . . ]
And this one, which manages to put a nice current-events spin on the classic:
Attn/ Please
Good day to you and your lovely family. I am Mr. Yassan Ali-Fayadh, the son of Late Dhari Ali al-Fayadh (Prominent Iraq's House of Assembly Member) who was killed along with three of his bodyguards and my Bother in a suicide bomb attack in the neighborhood of Rashdiya Northern Baghdad. Please view the news website below for detail Story of how I lost my Father and My Bother.
[Three links, including CNN and USAToday, deleted.]
My late Father deposited a huge amount with Company here in Dakar Senegal. I got your contact detail from a friend in the neighbor and have so much in trust in you. All I need from you is an assistance to transfer the fund my late Father deposited to
your country for investment until I regain my freedom. I will give you 32% of the total sum but most of all is that I solicit your trust in this transaction and will not want you to betray me, and I also want you to know that is a legitimate transaction and which is total risk free and we both will benefit from it. Please allcorrespondence should be directed to my private email: [email deleted] as await your reply soon. [ . . . ]
Before we continue: If you've made it this far in life, or even this far today, you should be aware of the fact that these are all frauds. But just in case this post is your first exposure to the internet in your life, do not reply to messages like these. Don't do it out of greed, don't do it out of pity, don't do it out of curiosity, don't do it out of humanitarianism. Just . . . don't.
If you do, you could wind up like John W. Worley, whose unenviable--but perhaps not pitiable--fate is chronicled in the May 15th issue of The New Yorker, in an aptly titled profile by Mitchell Zuckoff: "The Perfect Mark."
"Every swindle," says Zuckoff, "is driven by a desire for easy money; it's the only thing the swindler and the swindled have in common." Worley's story is not only one of his own--what does one call it? Greed? Self-delusion? Naïveté? It's also the story of swindlers who--with nothing more than email, from thousands of miles away--were able to play their victim like a violin, pushing all the right buttons to keep him coming back for more even when he knew he'd been had.
The story is fascinating and frustrating--a limitation of the printed page is that there's still no way to reach into it and slap someone for being breathtakingly foolish--and does not end happily, unless you were rooting for the swindlers all along. It begins with the first email, received by Worley in June 2001, and reaches its climax in May 2005, when Worley--a decorated veteran, ordained minister, Christian psychotherapist of some professional repute, liver of a very comfortable and upstanding life, and with nothing against his lifelong record--went on trial for bank fraud, money laundering, and possession of counterfeit checks.
But it doesn't end there.
The trial took six days, and the jury found Worley guilty on all counts. On February 15th, Worley, now sixty-two, returned to the federal courthouse at the edge of Boston Harbor to face sentencing. Accompanied by more than three dozen family members and friends, he arrived wearing a charcoal suit with a support-the-troops pin on the lapel. U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, Jr., acknowledging the “ordeal” that Worley had been through, said that he was nevertheless bound by the jury’s finding. He sentenced Worley to two years in prison, plus restitution of nearly six hundred thousand dollars, and gave him five weeks to turn himself in. Outside the courtroom, Barbara Worley, a stout woman with blond hair, said they would appeal. (They eventually decided not to.) “My husband is the victim here,” she said. “It’s an atrocity.”
One morning a week later, I drove past acres of winter-brown fields to the Worleys’ large, blue-gray house, which was owned by a trust created by the Lawrence family, one of Massachusetts’s nineteenth-century industrial dynasties. (The Worleys, looking for an inexpensive place to live after John left the Army, believe that divine guidance delivered them to the Lawrences, who needed the home restored and overseen.) Barbara, in a white bathrobe, let me in, saying she thought the meeting had been rescheduled. The house was dark, and the hallways were filled with packing boxes: Worley was preparing for prison, and Barbara was moving to a small house in a nearby town.
Barbara led the way upstairs to a living room with a brass plaque on the door. “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” it read. Worley entered, wearing a red-white-and-blue robe with an eagle on the back. He sat in a green leather chair, and fed treats to Pancake, the family cat. He seemed stunned by his misadventures of the past five years. “The communications that I had with those people were so convincing that I really believed that they were real, they were true,” he said. “I would question them and they would come back with a response that was adequate to cover my concerns each and every time.” Despite everything, he insisted that he still believed he had been dealing with the real Maryam and Mohammed Abacha. “I think they were legitimately trying to use me and my resources to get their funds out of Nigeria into a safe place where they could have access to them,” he said. Worley wasn’t sure whom to blame for the bad checks, though Nduka was suspect. “Somehow there was a buyoff, a payoff, or something that went on there, and then it got switched to the point where I was then dealing with fraudsters,” he said.
When I asked Worley what he wished he had done differently, he didn’t answer directly. Instead, he spoke about hoping that the Abachas would get back in touch with him. However, before they could resume work on the multimillion-dollar transfer, he expected them to send the six hundred thousand dollars that he needs for restitution.
“What if they sent you a check?” Barbara demanded. “Would you put it in the bank to see if it cleared again?”
“Yeah.”
“John!” she said.
“I don’t know,” Worley said finally, sounding defeated. “I have to have time to think about what I would do in that situation.”
And, in fact, the story doesn't even end here, with Worley sitting out his sentence in federal prison--at least not from the point of view of the swindlers, for whom Worley apparently continues to be a potential mark as long as he's breathing.
The ability of these people to keep their victim on the string--still dreaming about the phony chance they offered him the way a recovering addict will still dream about a fix--is uncanny. Read the story.
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