Looks like yours truly is on her way to easy street. I have been debating whether to tell anyone, especially since Ms. Williams e-mailed me directly with the note, "PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL," but I figure I can trust you.
You see, Ms. Williams needs my assistance, not yours or anybody else's, but mine. She probably read my blog and thought, "I can really trust this bitch." I know that is what she was thinking when she lovingly hit the send key to me. Sorry for gushing, but I am about to become 7.5 million dollars richer. Okay, 20% of that amount – heck, I was so excited I guess I skipped that minor point.
After receiving this money, I think I will be able to blog full-time. Wow. What a windfall.
Well, crap, looks like snopes.com thinks this may be someone trying to swindle me. Imagine that. Now I have read about stories like this, a lot of them coming from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and other countries that I have trouble finding on a map.
But they have different names, different e-mail addresses. Different. Crap. Who am I kidding? You know, I read that some countries get a significant amount of their GNP (gross national product) from these scams. Can you believe that?
I want to set my computer to "do not send out any information to anyone." Where is that button?
The unedited e-mail missive (please don’t send money):
From: Rose William (Mrs)
+27-733-948-018
THE MANAGING DIRECTOR/CEO
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
Good Day to you
I am Mrs.ROSE WILLIAMS,the widow of late Mr.Paul WILLIAMS, who was recently murdered in the land dispute in Zimbabwe. I decided to write you to seek your assistance for the transfer of a family fund,Before the death of my Husband he had taken my son to Johannesburg to deposit the sum of US$7.5Million (Seven Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars), in one of the private security Company, as if he foresaw the looming danger in Zimbabwe. This money was deposited in a box as germ stones to avoid much demurrage from Security Company. This amount was meant for the purchase of new machines and chemicals for the farms and establishment of new farm in Swaziland.
This land problem came when Zimbabwean President Mr. Robert Mugabe introduce a new Land Act reform which wholly affected the rich white farmers and some few blacks farmers. And this resulted to the killing and mob action by Zimbabwean war veterans and some lunatics in the society. In fact, a lot of people were killed because of this land reformed Act for which my Husband was one of the victim.
It is against this background that, I and my family who are currently staying in South Africa decided to transfer my Husband ’s money to a foreign account since the law of South Africa prohibits a refugee (asylum seeker) to open any bank account or to be involved in any financial transaction throughout the territorial zone of South Africa.
As the Mother of three son , Iam saddle with the responsibility of seeking a genuine foreign account where this money could be transferred without the knowledge of my government who are bent on taking everything we have got. The South African government seems to be playing along with them. I am faced with the dilemma of investing this amount of money in South Africa for fear of going through the same experience in future since both countries have similar political history. Moreover, the South African Foreign Exchange policy does not allow such investment for an asylum seeker.
As I intend to entrust my future and that of my family in your hands, I must let you know that this transaction is 100% risk free. If you accept to assist me and my family all I want you to do for me is to make arrangements and come to Johannesburg South Africa, so that you can open a non-resident Transmission account which will aid us in transferring the money into any account you will nominate overseas. This money I intend to use for investment.
I have two options for you; firstly you can choose to have certain percentage of the money for nominating your account AND your asistance in this transaction. Or you can go into partnership with me for the proper profitable investment of the money in your country. Whichever the options you want, feel free to notify me If you do not prefer a partnership I am willing to give you 20% of the money while the remaining 80% will be for my investment in your country.
Contact me with the above E-mail address or call my son on 09-27-733-948-018 his number cname is Charles William,while Implore you to maintain the absolute secrecy required in this transaction.
Yours Faithfully,
Rose William (Mrs)
(For the family).
NOTE: YOU CAN READ ABOUT PROBLEMS IN ZIMBABWE FROM THE
LINKS BELOW
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/918781.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/715001.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1063785.stm
Book Tour: Sometimes When I'm Jealous
4 weeks ago
3. My Stories. Yeah, I have a few erotic stories here. I know, they are not all that good, but they were fun to write. Don't read them if this offends you (and they represent less than 1% of the content here). These stories have elements of truth and fantasy, some more true than others. Complain about something that is a bit more substantive if you must complain. I have lots of faults.
16 comments:
Paul Williams was murdered in Zimbabwe? I wondered what happened to the little guy. I expected him to show up on "The Surreal Life" any time.
I am going to be on easy street too! Mr Mugwumpie in Nigeria needs my help on a similar matter. It must be because I am not blonde?
I've received these emails many times myself.
Now, when I am at the gallery that I work at, my boss says to me, "Deb, come look at this, do you think I should do this?"
Now they have a scam, where they ask a company, (or a gallery) "Hey, I would love to buy one of your paintings--the one for $1,000." I will give you $2,000.00 for it, however, would you please send the extra $1,000 back to me."
Now here's the deal. Our money is like a trillion more than theirs. (Not sure how much--but if we went there with $20 bucks, we could buy a fancy dinner for 5 people) My friend told me when she visited her girlfriend in S. Africa.
So he is trying to exchange his money for 'more'. I don't know how this works and also, if she sends him a 'check', he will have her account info. So I told her, if she does decide to help this guy out, to make it a money order. No check. No personal info.
Be careful with these scams. My gallery director never did go through with it.
Leesa I get like 3 of those letters a day! The sad...well sorta funny part is that a lot of people fall for it!
Gosh, I get those all day on all of my email accounts. Does that ever actually work??
Guess what I do. I actually respond. We communicate back and forth for weeks...lol. OMGosh it is the most hillarious thing to do. They actually start getting mad when you don't transfer the $400 dollars "immediately"..lol. What makes everything so fake. It that the emails are ridiculously informal.
I get these too, but never from anyone who seems as trustworthy as Rose William (Mrs.) I just can't believe this is some kind of scam!
Watch out for forged checks as well.. (Deb especially...tell your boss) We were paid with a watermarked micro-printed chashiers check for a motorcycle my husband sold in the paper last summer. The bank deposited the check to our account and we thought everything was hunky-dory until 3 weeks later the bank called to tell us that the check was fradulent. The had no idea, and so then we had no motorcycle, no check and a $5,000 loan with no colateral. We had to get a home equity loan to pay it off. The police made nearly no effoer to recover the motorcycle, and so we pretty much gave the guy my husband's bike. Bastard.
Leesa,
Will you send me some money?
I need about $756.75
I promise not to spend it on machinery or chemicals or Swazilands. I just need it for whiskey & whores, so you see, it will not be wasted. I'll send photos confirming my purchases.
Hugs & kisses!
-bert
before these morons started spamming via e-mail...I recieved a letter with the same modus operandi. I took it to the local FBI office, and they told me that they had a huge file of these things (this was like 10 years ago).
I gave money to an organization who helps overseas. I told the organization not to keep my donor info, but about 4 months after donating, I received a handwritten note from a "mother" asking for money to feed her children.
Local law enforcement told me that there are "sweatshops" in certain countries where they copy down certain letters and mail them (the stamp was from a third world country).
I kept the stamp.
See? It's awful--they tug at your heart strings... *sigh*
Well...most of these scams don't actually come out of the country they claim to be from. It takes like 2 seconds to figure out from e-mail headers it's likely for a very developed country. There are quite a few asian countries running unpatched mail servers (sendmail in particular) which will allow you to forge headers with relative ease. I can tell you exactly how to do this. It's not hard.
There are a couple universities in Zimbabwe and other developing African countries with poorly administered servers (thank you Microsoft for integrating everything into the kernel) which allow you to do a great number of neato keen things with their machines (thank you again Microsoft for using poor hashing techniques). I actually spoke to an admin in one of those developing African countries (through e-mail after a free and unsolicited security audit of said admin's machine) and they had relatively few resourced to prevent such breaches of security.
At anyrate, there area few techniques in which you can limit the number of e-mails you receive of this type..one of which involves using a real mail client (such as thunderbird) which actually follows standards and has built in spam filtering. Or you could be sure to never use an e-mail address in which you plan to use for any length of time on a website..._any_ website.
The second option will not keep your ISP's or whatever mail provider you happen to use from being subverted or implementing something stupid which allows a VRFY on the system or allows wildcard sending.
And there's that.
Oh...and don't use outlook express or Outlook....the worst and most poorly written applications EVER. I can't stress that enough. POORLY written...in fact..they are such security risks to a company's operations that any company which values security...does not use them. Healthcare organizations come to mine (I've worked for two very large organizations of those types) ISPs (I've worked for three) and government facilities. Well, admittedly the two entities within the government I worked with some users did use Outlook, but the functionality was severely hampered and login scripts prevented certain areas of the machines from being accesses by normal users and this prevents to some extent the damage Outlook could do to machines and subsequently the network.
Okay, prata, I just want to say that now I am officially scared of you. I have the sneaking suspicion you have the knowledge to send some electrons my way and have my computer turn into a zombie, emailing threatening messages to the Defence Department.
Here is what I don't understand - the government tried to sue Microsoft for "being a monopoly" (lots of technical terms, but bottom-line, that is what it was; unfairly packaging their products, etc). And the government is the biggest customer of Microsoft products in the US. Most government agencies use the MS suite of products (though some agencies are trying open source).
So...I guess I should stop waiting for my check in the mail? Dang, my hubby is going to be so mad that I fell for this...again. LOL, just joshin. I do get these nearly daily.
And deb ~ hon, tell her (even if it's for real) that it's called money laundering and it's illegal. Should she care. Me, personally, I don't think I'd be a good canidate for jail...people would get tired of my crying all the time, lol, especially me.
Yes yes you are correct. This shows you how disconnected the government is though. Sorry to be late on this, but I was out fighting "the blizzard" you can read that on my blog if you want to know about it lol
The government actually uses in the data center a mix of Unix and MS. Unix came before MS and so it mostly uses Curses applications and MS for the desktop with Unix pushing apps from the mainframe style of computing to the desktop. CEFMS is one application that comes to mine from the Corps of Engineers. This runs on DOS but is pushed from a Unix box.
One of the main reasons that the government uses MS so much currently is because of ease of use (government employees are not always [this depends on your branch of service, I'm excluding the armed units] the most widely computer literate users), and also the government also has several standards that must be met (which Microsoft was for a long time one of the few that could maintain this status) for government computer usage. Unix did not have a beautiful front end and this widened the gap between the two; however, opensource such as linux has managed to bridge that gap and as it is a unix like OS the government is seeing the good in that.
Thinking I might crack your machine....well I don't play with end user's PC's. That's what virus writers and script kiddies do. There is nothing permanent about end user's PC's. The real fun is in servers and more useful machines. Although zombie networks have a use (DOS attacks on high profile networks and platform usage for attacks upon networks which provide widespread communications).
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