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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.
It's not enough that Hollywood keeps remaking their old movies, even the internet is doing the same. This is a remake of the old P-p-p-powerbook story.
P-p-p-powerbook!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Ah, you've discovered our brilliant form of counter-espionage. Hollywood floods the planet with ridiculous stereotypes and bizarre portrayals of American society as part of a disinformation campaign to fool foreign powers. You and I might simply roll our eyes at a bad movie, but two invasion attempts were aborted due to concerns about the throngs of gun-toting mobsters and "masked avengers" in every American city. Several terror plots fell apart as the organizers became convinced that they had been overheard by CIA surveillance satellites bristling with parabolic microphones. And thousands of PRC agents wasted nearly five years trying futilely to "hack the Gibson."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The scam consists of: I pretend to pay you money, you send me valuable goods, but I really kept the money, and get the goods, too.
That's unfair, obviously -- to the tune of $400.
What actually happened: I pretend to pay you money, you send me a pretend laptop; I really keep the money, you really keep the laptop.
Since everyone has what they started with... how's that unfair? Maybe they had to pay customs a percentage of the fake price, so they lost a few bucks. You could say that, taken as a single incident, the outcome is unfair. (Then again, it could be viewed as a very fair penalty for attempted fraud.) But it's nowhere near their fraudulent gain from a successful scam, and since they have many more successes than scambaits like this, the fraudsters are still coming out way ahead.
You can take your moral equivalence and shove it up your ass, if you can find room next to your head in there.
Hey, since you seem to have two laptops - how about giving your extra one to a Nigerian?
I think we've all seen what these people do when we give them access to computers.
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.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde