Protecting Yourself On the Web – Lottery/Inheritance Scams

From: anne.spoorenberg@orange.fr
Subject: Can you handle this?
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:46:45 +0200

Hello Dear,
My name is Mrs.stella luz taborda; I am a dying woman who has decided to
donate what I have to you/church. I am 59 years old and I was diagnosed for
cancer for about 2 years ago immediately after the death of my husband who
has left me everything he worked for and because the doctors told me I
will not live longer than some weeks because of my health idecided to
WILL/donate the sum of $2 500 000 Two million five hundred thousand
dollars to you for the good work of humanity and also to help the
motherless and less privilege and also for the assistance of the widows.
I wish you all the best and may the good Lord bless you abundantly and
please use the funds well and always extend the good work to others.
Here is the Contact information of my Attorney below:
Orbin Law Firm
Abogado De Justicia
Calle Embajadores,106.2,Madrid,Spain
Notario & Tribunal
Sr Pedro Antonio
Phone/Fax:  +34 634 112 385
Email:abogadoantioped@aim.com
and tell him that I have WILLED $2 500 000.00
to you and I have also notified him. I know I don’t know you but I have
been directed to do this. Thanks and God bless.
NB: I will appreciate your utmost confidentiality in this matter until the
task is accomplished as i don’t want anything that will jeopardize my last
wish.
From Mrs.stella luz taborda.

—————————–

Above is an email I received in one of my accounts recently that I decided I’d use for the purpose of this blog. I get these quite often, and I wonder how these people think this could even work. The first problem I noticed with this email is the mismatch of names. I see that the email is supposedly from Anne Spoorenberg, but the first line of the email is “My name is Mrs.stella luz taborda”. I don’t know about you, but Mrs. Stella Luz Taborda does not look like Anne Spoorenberg, but maybe in some far away land, that’s how they’re translated. The next issue I find in this email is that it is poorly written, which destroys any chance that it had to appear professional and legitimate. Next is the mismatching of locations. The email came from a .FR address, which is a French email address, but the person is in Spain.

Ok, so all of those flags there definitely tell me that this email is far from legitimate, but lets just say I’m not much of a detective and just can’t catch these obvious flaws. How would someone like me, who thinks this is real know for sure this is a scam? How about the story in of itself? How does this person even know who I am? Do I know this person? Why would this person want me to help handle such a large sum of money? This story seems pretty far-fetched and a little too good to be true, and that is the case here. You don’t know the person or how they know you, the story seems a little odd, and you don’t even know anyone who’d lend you $20, so how could it be true? It’s not true, and these scams if you fall for them, will drain your wallets and bank accounts completely.

So, how do these scams work, if in fact they lure someone in? Well, they’ll tell you that they’ll send you this money, but they’ll need you to pay for some transfer fees and an escrow account. Whenever you see escrow mentioned, you should know to stop and end any contact with the person. For the sake of education, we’ll pretend that I keep falling for this scam. I paid the fees and have my escrow account setup, but there’s been a delay with processing. A couple things then can happen from here. 1) The scammers setup a fake escrow site and have just stolen all of my credit card/bank information and will begin draining my account. I’m now a victim of identity threft, and need to contact the proper authorities ASAP!  2) They need me to pay for some holding fees, processing fees, or some kind of customs fee or just anything they can think of. Since I could really use $2.5million, a few hundred bucks here and there won’t even matter, and as soon as my money gets here I’ll be good.  More issues come up, more money is needed, but I’m drained! There’s nothing I can do, so I tell the people I’m out of money and won’t be able to spend anymore. I need them to get it taken care of so I can get my money and I’ll even repay them for the troubles. There’s no contact for a few days, and there’s no way for me to get ahold of them. They just walked off with $2,500 of my cash and I fell for every bit of the scam.

These scams have shown up in my email quite frequently since I was 16 years old, and I always wondered how these people knew about me. They’re all from different countries, but somehow they’re either related to me, or I’m the relative of their dying friend who wants to give me lots and lots of their money for no real reason. I’ve seen them show up as me winning lotteries and the scam is all the same, and it never fails to amuse me.

Remember – If you don’t know the person, don’t know how they know you, and the story seems too good to be true, then it’s most likely a big scam. Do not fall for this, and report the email ASAP.

Stay safe on the web!

-Bobby

~ by rewalker3 on October 15, 2008.