Nigeria cracking down on e-scams

[RebelOne]

It's about time that the law starts cracking down and doing something about these crooks.

Monday, August 8, 2005; Posted: 4:50 a.m. EDT (08:50 GMT)

Internet cafes in Lagos warn Nigerians about sending fraudulent e-mail.

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) -- Day in, day out, a strapping, amiable 24-year-old who calls himself Kele B. heads to an Internet cafe, hunkers down at a computer and casts his net upon the cyber-waters.

Blithely oblivious to signs on the walls and desks warning of the penalties for Internet fraud, he has sent out tens of thousands of e-mails telling recipients they have won about $6.4 million in a bogus British government "Internet lottery."

"Congratulation! You Are Our Lucky Winner!" it says.

So far, Kele says, he has had only one response. But he claims it paid off handsomely. An American took the bait, he says, and coughed up "fees" and "taxes" of more than $5,000, never to hear from Kele again.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/08/08/nigeria.scammers.ap/index.html

[ixion]

1. I got that email

all you had to do was go to the lottery site and you could see that these allged 'winning numbers' were nowhere to be found.

It's about time... this has only been going on for four years now...

[RebelOne]

2. I receive at least 3 Nigerian scam letters a week.

And I can't count all the lotteries that I have supposedly won.

[zigster]

7. Have you ever

added your email address to website guestbooks? Because thats how a majority of them get your address from you.

"Apparently, the Mugu Guymen hang out in the internet cafes of their home country visiting thousands of guest-books and copy all of the email addresses they can find there. These email addresses become the next batch of recipients for the latest variation of the 419 scam. When they finish copying all the addresses from a site, they will post a silly message (like the one above), sometimes with a unique signature, to let other Mugu Men from their own operation know that they have already visited a particular guest-book and copied all the email addresses down up to the point of the Mugu Man's own posting. According to some of the web sites, the word Mugu itself means "fool" or "gullible person" in Nigerian.

This is a far less sophisticated method of harvesting email addresses (but more effective at overcoming the safeguards we put into hiding the email addresses on our sites) than the spam bots who surf across millions of pages in search of online email addresses for their Spam Masters.

Basically, there is little to be done. If your email address is online and viewable on a web page (even if it is "invisible" in the code to spam bots by using complicated JavaScript to assemble the address for the browser, a technique I use on many of my sites), the Mugu man can find the address and add it to their database. I recommend to everyone that if you post an email address online, don't use your primary email address. Keep a "spamable" address for online submissions of all kinds."

http://www.muninn.net/blog/archives/000031.html

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

3. I've gotten the email about helping a Nigerian aristocrat transfer

his funds overseas by supplying my bank and credit card info.

Then, when he safely transfers those funds to my bank account, I'll get a million dollars from him in gratitude.

Sounds reasonable. :eyes: MKJ

[RebelOne]

4. Yeah, go for it!! n/t

[Zuni]

5. But a Nigerian government official has 14 million unclaimed US $$$

that he wants to transfer to me, as long as I give him my banking and other financial info.

How can I lose?

Damn the Big Nigerian Government and its regulators! :cry:

[zigster]

6. Its fun to turn the tables on them

http://www.ebolamonkeyman.com/

http://www.419eater.com/

The funniest one:

http://www.419eater.com/html/joe_eboh.htm

-continued here:

http://www.419eater.com/html/joe_eboh2.htm

http://www.419eater.com/html/joe_eboh3.htm

http://www.419eater.com/html/joe_eboh4.htm

http://www.419eater.com/html/joe_eboh5.htm

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

8. thanks for the link, LMAO at the one with the "red breast",

funny, funny, funny! MKJ

:rofl: