Re: [Fsfe-uk] The recent Nigerian mail

[Martin WHEELER]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Richard Smedley wrote:

> I don't think we need to waste bandwidth worrying about it.
> After all anyone who joins in a venture to steal money from
> the people of a poor country may thoroughly deserve to be
> conned :-)

Ummm.  It's not always "stealing money from the people of a poor
country".  I have personal (NOT secondhand) experience of one of these
scam artists, who conned a highly intelligent and respectable accountant
I know here in the SW into "receiving" monies for a charity, said to
originate from the interest accruing from accounts held by the Vatican,
to be distributed to worthy causes.
Very glib; very plausible; very slickly carried out.  It took me 48
hours hard digging on the internet to tie this guy into fraud; the
accountant concerned very nearly lost his business *and* his home
because of it.  He damn' near had a mental breakdown because of it, too.
So don't underestimate the power of some of these schemes.  They are NOT
as immediately recognisable as you may think.  And the overall
atmosphere they engender all around them is very, very frightening
indeed.  Be seriously warned.

OK -- the 4-1-9 texts are way OTT for us  --  I sometimes wonder about
their effect on people who have English as their third or fourth
language, though.


> Serious point: when we move the list, some spamming
> filters might be in order :-/

Couldn't agree more.


Martin
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