Check this little article I found before eating dinner last night:
A 73-year-old retired electronics specialist sat for a long interview in December in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, patiently explaining that the $300,000 nest egg he had just lost on a familiar Nigerian scam was really the fault of “corrupt governments” and not the dishonesty of his Nigerian “friends” who had no choice but to ask him to pay ever-escalating investment amounts. The man repeatedly insisted that his “friends” couldn’t possibly be scammers, but toward the end of the two-hour interview, finally remembered that they “never did really explain how they got my name.”
2 Minute News, East Side South, vol 4.17
Personally, I always laughed at how ludicrous these emails were and would say to myself:
How in the hell could anybody fall for something like this?
Looks like I was proven wrong. I wonder what those guys are doing with his $300,000 now. In one way, it’s really sad that this poor man got owned by spam, but on the other hand, it proves how spam actually works. As an aside, at work we get about 200-300 pieces of mail a week for a certain “Carmen.” Can anybody scream marketing scam? I’ve done my research on this entity, and it seems the Postal Service has as well, but the mail just keeps coming in with people wanting to inherit a fortune for just $35. What makes the matter even more depressing is the fact that I’ll be sorting this mail out and see something like this:
YOU ARE A FRAUD! GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK! EVIL EVIL EVIL! THIS LADY IS EVIL (insert picture of Carmen here).
And yes, this is all over the envelope.