I've won! I'm rich! I've won!

[flutterbee]

This week I won $1 million from Microsoft. That's the second time, at least. Last week I won $1 million from Yahoo. (Don't tell them that I prefer Google. ) A bank in Nigeria wants me to help them find the beneficiaries of $5.4 million of which I will get a nice cut and I might even be the long, lost relative of someone in a country in Africa I've never even heard of.

What am I going to do with all this money?



What I want to know, is how is it that people actually fall for this stuff??? It must work...they keep sending them out.

 

[Abbey]

No, Heather...I got the same email. We'll have to fight over the money.

Abbey

 

[Andy]

What do you mean you don't know what to do with the money? You are suppose to give it to the Nigerian bank so they can find their beneficiaries and pay you back twice as much. Then you wil have enough money to go visit your long lost relative - you may even take pity on them and give them whatever is left over from the trip.

DUH!!!

 

[klmno]

Shoot, I thought you won the lottery and were letting us know how you were going to share it. I'm really disappointed in you now.
LOL

I've heard of these scams but haven't gotten one. The main thing is- as I'm sure everyone knows- don't send them money on the pretense that they will send you more.

 

[Hound dog]

Must have been a big week for the bank. I got TWO of the darn things. lmao

 

[Star*]

Darn -

I figured the magic catbus would pull up in front of my house with a bevy of beauties from the board on there for a real trip to anywhere.

- oh and FYI - I 'may' have already won a millon dollars. pft.

 

[Andy]

The 180 million ticket was sold in Minnesota!!!


I didn't buy a ticket!

Now I know what they mean by, "If you don't buy a chance, you don't get a chance"


Oh well, tommorrow is another day. Another chance to not purchase the winning ticket. I am soooo good at that. Even when I buy a ticket, it usually is not the winning one.

 

[Marguerite]

The danger with the Nigerian scam isn't tat you send them a few hundred dollars to pay initial fees etc (yeah, right!) which you never see again... the danger is, you reveal too much of yourself and you find your ID has been stolen, with money heisted in a number of ingenious ways which all come back to you. They can take out a loan in your name; they can upload a trojan horse onto your computer to record all keystrokes (and hence get your account details, your passwords etc). I've also heard of people who have travelled to meet these people and gotten into some very nasty trouble.

At the very least, by replying AT ALL, you can find your email address being on-sold as a "live one". Next you find yourself getting vast truckloads of spam, from Russian girls desperate to meet a handsome Western man who will may for them to come to the US to marry them, to constant bombardment to buy cheap medications.

I did find a website once which had the exchange of emails between the bloke whose site it was, and a Nigerian scammer. He replied, and posted his messages and all responses, to show people just how these scams can work. He used an email address which he considered disposable, and was very careful to not reveal anything personal.

An interesting point I read somewhere - the amount of money promised by these scammers is often orders of magnitude greater than the Gross Domestic Product of the country where the money was supposedly accumulated.

Maybe some time in the future there will be a Zimbabwe scam, claiming to be in the name of Robert Mugabe?

Old scams never die, they just reinvent themselves.

Marg

 

[susiestar]

I also wonder who on earth falls for these things. But there are people out there with computers and the intelligence of a box of rocks, so maybe they are the ones who fall for this.

I get these every week. It is a waste of energy to send them, in my humble opinion.

Please be very careful NEVER to do anything more than delete them.

Susie