Nigerian Scammer Gets the Laptop He Deserves

wiredmikey writes "After switching to a Mac recently, I decided to put my old laptop up for sale to help recoup a little of the Mac cost. I received an email almost immediately from a girl named Rebecca and we had this email exchange." My favorite part is the fake letter from the FBI demanding tracking numbers.

Comments

Subject

[Ihmhi]

P-p-p-powerbook!

Re:FBI

[crmarvin42]

I've actually broached this subject with a couple of different Nigerian guys that I went to Graduate School with. They told me how Nigeria has such an ethnically diverse population (literally thousands of ethnic groups with their own distinct languages), that the only way the government can work is if everyone speaks English (courtesy of the old British Colonial occupation). The problem is that everyone speaks their native tongue at home, and only learns English in school and some times they don't learn it until they are high school aged. For most Nigerians, English is not about getting the grammar right, but about being understood. As long as the person to whom you are talking gets the gist of what you are saying, then that is enough. All of the Nigerians I know (a dozen or so) either were tutored prior to applying to US graduate schools, or attended private schools that drilled British English with a strong focus on speaking English like it was their 1st and not 2nd language.

The up shot of all this is that those Nigerians who could have proofed such emails are too busy working legitimate jobs to waste their time helping out the scammers, and the scammers are to illiterate to realize that their poor grammar is a dead giveaway.