Advance Fee Fraud Email

Feb 11 10:59 UTC 2000

You know the so-called "Nigerian letters" where you get
a letter from (most frequently) Nigeria about how you
can get lots of money and, by the way, there will be
a small advance fee?

I've gotten two of them by email. One of them went by
a web proxy through Yahoo (so I can't trace the IP)
and told about a wonderful opportunity in Nigerian government
contracts and gave Nigerian phone contacts.

Then, this week, I got about 10 turds from Ghana. It seems
that the interim central bank president in Sierra Leone had
been executed for helping the rebels and he had managed to
er um take $28 million in silver and it's now in Ghana and
his widow wants help in getting it out.

(A person who runs a Sierra Leone website told me that the
death sentence had only been carried out on millitary personel
and the ex-bank president was still in jail and that there hadn't
been $28 million in silver in Sierra Leone--they had hard currency
accounts in places like London.)

I got tired of getting them and faxing them to the embassy in
Canada via tpc.int (I tried calling it in to the NYC consulate
but I got trapped in voice mail hell and infinite waits) and I
finally responded that an acquaintance in Ghana had traced the
phone number and she had better take the first plane out of
the country before something bad happened.

I suppose it's like when bank robbers quit using horses and went
to Model T's.