More than 20 years ago, when I was owner of a fairly large business, I got the original nigerian scam letters. They came in the mail, at first, on onion skin paper and looked like they were typed by a third grader. One would hardly expect the party typing the letter to have the hundreds of millions of dollars they said they had. And all they asked was that you send the annonymous person from a foreign land your bank account numbers and a few sheets of your letterhead. As the scam evolved, the pleas for help started coming in by FAX. And now I find that they come in by Email. I got four in Email last week. But, just the other day, I was contacted by them finding me here at active rain. The Email referenced active rain and required my immediate attention. So they must be scouring the internet for groups such as ours. Personally, in this town, I know of one man who actually fell for the scam, and sent them a few thousand dollars to "expedite the transfer of millions of illegal dollars into his account". I have a friend in the RCMP in Canada. He says there have been a few documented cases of Canadians, and Americans too, who discovered they were conned and actually flew to Nigeria to track down the scammers. A couple of these people never came back and some were beaten up. I read an article, for public distrubution by the Mounties. It said that the border guards in Nigeria sometimes work with the scammers, and people going to hunt them down are arrested at the border and end up in Nigerian prisons. The stupid letters are fun to read but one sure never wants to get suckered into the ploy. Now, if you are lucky enough to have never received such a letter, there is an example of one at the first site below. A link to some RCMP information is below that.
http://www.scamorama.com/scam1.shtml
http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/scams/west_african_e.htm
Thanks for looking,
Steven L. Smith
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