Posted on 10/05/2011 7:01:00 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Email scammers tout assets of deposed Arab leaders
(Reuters) - Scam emails supposedly from close aides or relatives of deposed Arab leaders are offering a huge chunk of their assets if recipients hand over their bank details or pay a fee up front.
"The quantity of attacks of this sort that we detect is enormous," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at Sophos, which uses sophisticated spam filters to identify scam emails.
In one email, a scammer pretends to be the wife of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. She says she has managed to escape to Tunisia and is desperately looking for a "reliable partner" to transfer $25 million of Gaddafi's funds.
"I am very sick of these wars. People are dying every day.
"I am offering 35% and you will also help me invest 65% of my share into any lucrative business in your country ... but if not please keep it safe for me until everything goes quiet," the email reads.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
419 Scam and there are idiots out there that fall for them. I see a couple a week in my spam.
Too late folks...I jumped on that offer.
Ghadafi’s wife is sending me a check for $35,000,000. I just have to run by Western Union today and send her a customs clearance and doc fee of $2000.
To ADMIN...I’ll soon be able to make a healthy contribution to Freeper! Where’s that link again?
You did better than me, but at least I didn’t lose out. I just barely avoided having all my assets frozen. Fortunately, I responded immediately to the IRS email (misspellings and all) and sent them my SSN, bank account and routing numbers, and PINs, as requested, so that they would not freeze all my accounts. Their email address? IRS@yahoo.com. It doesn’t get more official than that, does it?
No matter. The literacy rate across the Mid-East is only, on average, about 10 percent, so most people who get the email would only squiggly lines and symbols.
I’m sure there will soon be an experienced corps of Nigerian international bankers offering us all opportunities to help innocent people get their money out of Libya and other nations in turmoil.
I almost got one of those, too, but it never got to my inbox. My mail server deleted it because it had a virus...
Does anybody really fall for these things?
Greed works wonders. The easy score, the dream of many, comes into play on these scams. Yes there are fools that fall into it. They had specials on TV about them too.
I have allowed countless fortunes to slip through my fingers due to my innate suspicion of unsolicited offers of wealth. When will I ever learn to trust people? Alas! I shall die poor.
“Does anybody really fall for these things?”
One born every minute!
Many people don’t realize that a couple of years ago when the IRS changed their policy of having you write your checks to the U.S. Treasury rather than the I.R.S. was due to IRS employees opening bank accounts under names such as Ira Robert Smith and squeezing the names into the Pay To: line on the IRS checks and depositing them into their own accounts!
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