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Nigerian Scammers Brought to Justice
KaushalParekh writes "Almost all of us get those junk emails from someone in Africa usually promising millions of dollars if you give them your bank details. Finally good to know that they are being caught by the authorities and punished. These are also known as 419 emails named after the Nigerian penal code for fraud. As an interesting aside, fooling these scammers by responding to their emails is a fun passtime for quite a few who call themselves baiters. Check out the trophy pictures of these spammers.. pretty funny."
The 419 in the article says the most common for is email fraud, but the person arrested didn't use email, it was a bank job.
You can't take the sky from me
Recently I received a mail asking for a quote for delivery of a crate of a particular Texas Instruments integrated circuit to a location in Lagos, Nigeria
It was blatantly not a misdirected mail as my email address couldn't be confused with any major electronics retailer. Is there some ongoing scam that relies on getting goods sent and not paying for them? (Escrow fraud?)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The case in this article is a large-scale bank fraud, not the spam-based crap we all get. "Amaka Anajemba admitted helping her late husband to persuade an employee of a Brazilian bank to transfer millions of dollars into overseas accounts." Additionally, this all happened in 1998. Don't hold your breath for any relief from the 419 spam.
I have heard that once you go for the bait, you are typically asked to send more and more small sums of money for information. But they actually do mail you some documents which can be typically reproduced free at the many government run social centers. The thing is, they never do actually send any useful information till you give up. Remember, you always send a self addressed envelope so they do not lose. As I write this, a colleague tells me a similar ad exists in todays' free Metro news paper! These Canadians - What are they good at?
The website will celebrate two years of baiting scammers this September. No word if there will be a contest this year, as there was last year (plugging my prize-winning contest entry there), as Shiver is running a Christmas contest (and already has killer entries).
If they're not, you can always get them to join a church or two.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Sounds more like the dictatorship Equatorial Guinea in west Africa, not Mozambique.
Neither of those are monarchies, though. (Moz is even a democracy) Perhaps you're thinking about Lesotho or Swaziland, both south African monarchies.. Although they don't have any significant oil AFAIK.
There was a 60 Minutes peice on a country in South Africa, I think it was Mozambique, but I don't remember.
South Africa is a country. If you want to talk about the region it's Southern Africa.
Also, the only mention that I could find to something similar to what you discuss in your post is Equatorial Guinea, which is part of West Africa or Central Africa, depending on who you listen to. Either way, you're off by a few thousand miles. Oh, and they have a president, not a king.
siener's youtube channel
I live in South Africa myself, so I can't really recommend any good books on the country, never having had to have read one that gives a visitor's perspective :-)
I can however give you two URL's: the SA Tourism Department's portal to the country : http://www.southafrica.net/ and a privately run website which I know little about but appears to have a fair amount of factual data about SA, at least after a cursory examination: http://www.southafrica.com/
Incidentally, there are plenty of poor white people (although many more black ones) in SA, and plenty of middle-income to filthy rich black, indian and coloured people in SA too. That all white people in SA are filthy rich is just not true, and never has been.
Daar is nie 'n lepel nie
We do it with spammers and irresponsible ISP's, Why not a country ?
What about an entire continent? No that would be just plain stupid wouldn't it...
Oh wait isn't Verizon still blocking the entire of Europe from sending email to their servers?
Combine that with an average daily salary of about 1 USD and it doesn't take much success to live off a scam like that.
But I've recently started receiving more and more variations from other countries. Mainly other developing countries, but I did recently receive one that purported to be from a former bank manager at a Scottish branch of Lloyds TSB (one of the largest banks in the UK)...
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2F www.419eater.com%2Fhtml%2Fhall_of_shame.htm
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Gather up all the "evidence" you can: bank statements, receipts, mail, emails, etc.
Get all the names to all the cops/Secret Service people you spoke with.
Get all the names to all the bank staff you spoke to.
Get dates/times for as many of the conversations you had.
TAKE ALL THIS TO A LAWYER!
The lawyer will weigh your situation and make a determination as to how to proceed in your best interest.
The bank says you owe $8k. Frankly, that is not a lot of money to them, but to you I'm sure it's quite significant.
One thing I know for sure. If your lawyer even files a dispute, you will owe nothing until the dispute is resolved. Filing is easy. Don't roll over and take this lying down. The bank is playing hard ball in hopes that you simply cave in and feel helpless. If you show some back bone they are going to have to make a cost/benefit analysis as to how much they want to fight for this $8k.
The Bank got screwed too. Bringing the law enforcement officials into this in the context of a legal case may actually put everyone on the same side.
It may also prompt a settlement.
Get a lawyer, play hard ball, but keep an open mind. Your going to have to be the bigger person in this situation.
Oh, and BTW, talk to a lawyer.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
One great advantage of accepting cashiers checks is that they're very easy to verify (anytime you get one from an untrusted source, you should basically do this).
On all cashiers checks there should be a number that you can call. Probably not toll-free, it will take you to the "Official Checks" division of that persons bank. It's very easy to look at this number, and then verify that it actually is really connected to this bank (and not someones home number).
Then, just call the number. After going through tons of prompts and entering in all the check information, you'll be told in seconds if it's valid or not. This is not from your perspective but rather the banks. If you had deposited the check and it later bounced, it would have been bounced by the bank that you're now talking on the phone too.
What I just can't understand though, is that if you can basically do this in a matter of minutes, why does it take the banks weeks to actually clear the damn thing?!?
If you mess with a scammer involved in an "Organized Crime" gang
Which is what most of them are these days. The Belgian and Dutch police came around last year after a crackdown in Amsterdam sent the scammers scurrying for other countries. Some of them were so desperate they would drive up to the front of web hosting centres with a car full of old PCs and a few switches, and start asking around for contacts. After getting an icy reception in Belgium and France, their operations have started up again in Spain.
From what police told us about the gangs, its really well organised. This is translated from a Dutch presentation, which is not my native language so the words are not quite right.
There is a hierarchy in the gangs, different groups do different jobs, just like in a western corporation.
The foot soldiers are the ones buying spamming lists and sending out millions of emails. They work from apartments in Europe, rented for just a month or two, with DSL or cable broadband. Sometimes they are guys in cybercafes in Africa. Usually there are a bunch of guys living in a place, sleeping on a few matresses in one room, the other room full of workstations. Mostly these guys are recently arrived african immigrants, who have no scruples about ripping off Europeans or Americans, many are recruited with the promise to even the score with the white colonials who fucked over central africa a few centuries ago. Their job is to sort through the thousands of responses from spam filters, bounce messages, tons of flaming abuse, in the hopes they get a qualified lead (usually a few replies showing more than a passing interest). Leads are passed off to a handler.
The handlers are the real scam artists. They don't bother mucking about with the spam, they just work the few suckers dragged up each day. Once they have a sucker on the line, they slowly reel them in. When you read the 'baiters websites, you can tell when this happens because there is a change of email address/name on the other end. Handlers are typically foot soldiers who have earned enough trust within the crime organisation by showing they can keep a sucker around for a while. These are the ones who fake up certificates and create whatever seems right to reel in the sucker. Once a handler gets to the point where money will start flowing, they pass off the operation to the money team.
The money teams are the nasty criminals. They have a dozen different ways of getting money out of the UK or the US and into Africa or a European bank. Western Union, bank transfers, cashiers cheques. The goal is leave a break in the trail if/when the authorities start investigating, then launder the money so it looks legitimate. They tend to be well educated, understand western banking practices, and based in corrupt countries like Nigeria. The money gangs use a lot of local people as fronts, and control them with violence.
Once the money is laundered, it circulates back through the criminal organisation, with a large percentage going to the heads of the gangs.
These gangs have their own internal support organisations, technicians to buy the PCs for the foot soldiers and keep them running, fronts to rent apartments and order broadband, fixers setting up temporary email accounts by the thousands, and some geeks to run the spam botnets and help train new guys. Of the four identified organised crime gangs in Europe, they probably employ over a thousand people.
The only real danger from these gangs is from trying to follow them to Africa, where the nasty groups operate from. They rarely set up in Europe or the US, because they know they can buy both the police and the judicial system in their own country. Most attempts to bring them to justice go nowhere.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on