The Six Million Dollar Relative

This is a rather interesting e-mail which arrived in my inbox early this morning. It is interesting for a number of reasons, take a look at the screenshot below and see if you can spot the reasons I found it rather entertaining?:



OK, so what did you spot?

These are the points that caught my interest:

• Used part of my name, in this case my Surname.


• Used the name of someone who might be related to me.


• Used a Microsoft Word document attachment rather than the usual ASCII text or HTML body.

Right, let's now have a look at what the Word document contains [opened in OpenOffice, not Word, for security reasons]:



Here's a close-up of the text in the word document:



As you can see this is a missing-relative 419 scam, they want me to pose as a relative to the alleged deceased person, so that 'we' can claim the 32 MILLION US Dollars for ourselves instead of, and I quote "funds of this nature end up in the greedy pockets of some politicians due to our corrupt society". I get 20 percent, which they esitmate is almost 6.5 MILLION Us Dollars.

So, you heard it straight from the horses mouth [or at least one of the horses orifices] that these scams have nothing to do with corrupt and ethically bankrupt scammers like the one behind this version, it's all the politician and goverment officials who are to the 'bad guys'! Yeah, right! Although, this quote from Alfred E Newman, might swing your vote:

"Crime does not pay... as well as politics."

Sometimes these 419 scams contain links to real news stories or tragedies that have occurred, the scammers believe that you will be more willing to fall for their scam if some of the data can be verified.

There is no money, as usual, this is a scam which has been around in one format or another for many years, the names of the intended victim, deceased and scammer change frequently, but all that happens if you get caught up with these scammers is that you will lose money, not gain any.

Just because they use your name and link it with an allegedly deceased person with the same surname, doesn't mean that participating in this scheme [even if the money actually existed, which it doesn't] isn't fraud; it most definitely is!