Dude! They’re gonna sic all the crimes agencies on you!

Didn't know the mayor of Colebrook had the power to shut down bank accounts. Is he also the owner of the bank?

Yeah, I know. And just because I didn't pick up the $10.5 million I had coming to me.

Tell you what, FBI. Keep the money. Put it toward the national debt or buying emblematic playing cards for Air Force One or something, 'kay?

Obvious spam is obvious. But amusing, for some values of amusing.

I wonder if they've ever sent it to any actual FBI employees?

Every so often I am very tempted to answer one of these letters just for shits and giggles. I love the fractured English and explanations of what the problem is, like the ladies who have cancer and are dying in two months. I know there are people who believe these things and screw up their lives but I find them to be great entertainment.

Did you know that the word "gullible" isn’t in the dictionary?

Yes, actually. It was removed on 04/01/1998.

PurpleGirl @5, are you familiar with guy who answered back, claiming to be a character from HP Lovecraft?

Avram -- I didn't know about that one. I know other people(fans) have answered and kept the correspondence going for a while. They make me laugh. I'll read the Lovecraftian example. Thanks.

While flawed, the epic poem FBI NOTICE KINDLY ++++ can be considered a modern conceptual guerilla poetry; a Nigerian e.e. cummings, if you will. It's an inspired work, falling just short of brilliance.

The poem opens with a desperate pean to the reader, trying ineffectually to bridge the gulf between strangers:

"This is the final warning you are going to receive
from me do you get me? I hope you understand how many
times this message has been sent to you?."

Breaking the 4th wall, the author then moves on to self-referential irony, criticizing the reader in their own place, incorporating the theme of the dehumanization of the modern, technological age:

" Your ID which we have in our database have been sent
to all the crimes agencies in America for them to
inset you in their website as an internet fraudsters
and to warn people from having any deals with you."

Then the author proceeds to express the yearning for a common moral frame of reference in a modern, amoral age:

"As a good Christian and a Honest man, I decided to see
how i could be of help to you because i would not be"

If there is one element which prevents FBI NOTICE KINDLY ++++ from achieving true masterwork status is its resort to a metaphor of Christian salvation in the conclusion, which seems cheap after its radical, materialist opening:

"You are given a grace
today to make the payment for the document after which
your failure to do that will attract a maximum arrest"

Still, an excellent work and well worthy of its pending publication in the New Yorker. We look forward to the author's upcoming bound volume, PLEASE RESPOND URGENTLY PLEASE!!!!

Unsurprising, given the length of the comment. Hopefully I shall be freed soon! I bring sardines and Hob-Nobs as bribes!

Google "fbi anti-piracy virus computer locked" for examples of a more credible attack (or follow this link for a description, and advise how to remove it once it's struck).

This particular virus locks your computer screen and redirects your browser to a bogus FBI Anti-Piracy screen where you're told unauthorized copyrighted material (or depending on the version of the virus, child pornography) has been detected on your computer, and you have 48 hours to pay a $200 fine (via MoneyPak) to unlock it.

Needless to say, this is a bad idea for several reasons.

Saw this at work recently — the victim, an intern, was certain his job was at risk and was set to pay the $200. He was talked out of this, and the IT department was able to get a grip on it. They said it most likely came from an infected website, and probably loaded itself in the background without any action on the part of the victim (i.e, he did not need to click on any links or open any files).

One of the other links I followed up on my Google research suggested that the virus (or at least one of its versions) uses Flash, and would turn on your webcam (telling you the FBI could use the video as evidence to identify the guilty party). It sounded like a Flash-blocker on your browser would provide protection.

I love the implication that the Director of the FBI[*] is suffering from some kind of extreme split personality disorder, to the point where he's calling himself up on the phone ("our director has called to inform me that the warrant of arrest has been signed against you").

[*] Of course the email is from the Director -- he signed it himself! What more proof do you need?

I got one once which claimed to be from someone who had been hired to kill me, but they had had a change of heart and were willing to give it up and hand over all the evidence implicating the person who had ordered the hit so I could sue them for a 5 figure sum. I was also instructed not to go to the police as they were watching me.

I'm not dead, so it must have been a scam. Also, if I had evidence that someone was trying to have me killed? Sueing them would not be in the top 5 things I would do. Maybe after they've been covicted.

I think you don't have to pay the money, "because you have been given a mandate." Everyone knows that if you have a mandate, you can do whatever you like with no consequences.

Josh Berkus @ 9: I find it reminiscent of the work of the poet Ewan McTeagle.

Be very wary of the Owerri folk.

You would make the payment through western union money transfer with the below details.
RECEIVER’S NAME: UZOUKWU CLETUS
ADDRESS: LAGOS NIGERIA
TEXT QUESTION: IN GOD
ANSWER: WE TRUST
AMOUNT: $98

I find this "text question" puzzling. Is this part of the protocol for sending money by Western Union?

Bill Higgins -- the text question is an alternate option for recipients who can't provide photo ID.

Here's the thing... when you identify their targets as "completely gullible", that sounds suspiciously like victim-blaming to me. I'd say they are targeting people of doubtful or compromised mental competence. (I say "compromised" to indicate temporary impairments or excursions, such as stress or crisis situations.)

...that sounds suspiciously like victim-blaming to me.

Well, it isn't. Your suspicions are unfounded and, frankly, insulting.

I apologize for any insult I may have given, and I assure you it was unintentional. (My preceding note was dashed off as I was getting dragged out for a walk by my dog, so, hasty.)

My point remains that the degree of gullibility needed to be taken by one of those, would at least raise suspicion of actual impaired judgement, and a lot of the stories I've heard involve just that -- one type includes elderly people edging into dementia, and folks with a history of being cheated big-time. But the other type is more interesting... that's people who are panicked -- they're already scared about some life situation, and that's left them with their critical faculties suppressed. Poverty is an obvious risk factor for that, but... well, these days there's plenty of fear and anxiety to go around.

There are also people so completely honest themselves that they can't imagine someone lying.

Jim Macdonald #21: There are also people so completely honest themselves that they can't imagine someone lying.

Jim, the consequent there does not follow.

I'm closer to that than most folks -- you may recall I'm on the autistic spectrum. But even the most honest person will eventually be lied to, and most will discover that not every claim made by a stranger can be trusted. I was late learning that, but I did get there eventually. No matter how honest someone is, the incapacity to learn (even delayed) that others sometimes aren't, is a significant mental deficit in its own right. (Yes, that sort of thing is part of what makes autism a handicap or disability, according to degree.)

I seriously resent seeing these shysters explicitly target my own "there but for the Grace of God" crowds, including not only "more autistic" people, but folks with compromised judgement by various causes. Interestingly, the biggest con I ever fell for wasn't that sort of bold-faced deceit, it was a hormone-assisted hard-sell on a overpriced "dating service" (that didn't provide much actual "service"). Still sleazy, but it doesn't offend me half as much as the Nigerian pattern.

Still, the scammers need a mechanism to rapidly discard the people who won't send them money. If they can do that early, so that they'll only hear from the people who are likely to send them money, that saves them time.

How are we to describe the folks who don't see through these things instantly? Or the ones who truly believe that they won a lottery that they hadn't entered, or who wind up sending thousands of dollars to beautiful young ladies (or handsome young gentlemen) that they met on-line?

No one says they're at fault; the scammers are, and the scammers are constantly working on perfecting their art. The misspellings, the tortured grammer, then, are put in place to keep away the folks who will only waste the scammers' time rather than send money.

The reason marks are called "marks" dates to the old days of carnivals: As each person paid their dntry fee, the fellow at the ticket booth would run a simple, deniable, short-change scam on them. Those who didn't catch on, a big bluff fellow would come along and slap them on the back, leaving a chalk mark on the person's shoulder. That mark would alert all the other grifters that here was a pigeon ready for plucking on the grounds that someone who would fall for one scam would likely fall for another.

PurpleGirl #5 wrote: "Every so often I am very tempted to answer one of these letters just for shits and giggles."

There is, or was, a whole community of people who do/did just that. Their specialty was reverse-scamming the scammers into taking humiliating photos of themselves, as facilitated by language barriers and cultural unfamiliarties. One URL that will probably make excellent gnome-food:

http://www.419eater.com/html/trophy_room.htm

Whoopsie. :(

Jim, it's just predatory behavior, looking for an "easy kill": that is, the most vulnerable among us. Your (interesting) origin for the term "mark" amounts to the same thing with a cooperating pack.

But to steal a line from Teresa's quotefile, society is meant to be more forgiving than a state of nature. This sort of victimization is the antithesis of protecting our weak, and dammit, I want there to be something we can do about it. :-(

See also: THE ADVENTURES OF WENDY WILLCOX
and her dog Willis

Dave, part of what I'm doing with this is putting up the full text of the spam so that anyone Googling on any of the key phrases will find it here, clearly labeled as a scam.

One of ML's areas of interest is fraud.

That's my small part of trying to protect folks. Knowledge, power, you know.

"There are also people so completely honest themselves that they can't imagine someone lying."

I don't believe that.

Dave Harmon@18, Jim isn't saying that the scammers are looking for somebody who's gullible because of some specific personality defect; they don't care about that unless it lets them roll a better story. This isn't about "gullible-with-negative-connotations", or victim-blaming, it's victim-choosing strategy about "will they believe our scam and send us money without us wasting too much of our time?"

Some Nigerian scams are intended to get some money in one transaction, such as getting bank account information so they can steal all the money. The bigger scams are intended to find a victim and keep deceiving them into sending more and more money. Because getting to the big payoff takes time, effort, and often multiple actors, they only want to do that much work if they have somebody who will believe their lies and not back out before sending the larger chunk of money at the end.

I think Jim's probably right that the bad spelling is a deliberate selection tactic. Painful as it is to read, it's a really quick way to identify that kind of spam.

"Still, the scammers need a mechanism to rapidly discard the people who won't send them money. If they can do that early, so that they'll only hear from the people who are likely to send them money, that saves them time."

It sure sounds reasonable when you say this but...

How much does the obviously fraudulent nature of the messages spur people to craft false replies in order to goading the scammer such as we've seen in this thread? I would think that the idiotic ones are more of a prompt to false replies because they seem funnier and of course when one reads them there is a sense of dealing with an idiot which makes people feel more powerful and able to fool their correspondent.

So if they want to get rid of gullible people what does it say that they are so seemingly gullible themselves to spend so much time on obviously fraudulent replies?

I'm guessing that the scammers are themselves being scammed by some higher ups, that these are the gullible get rich quick nigerians who have bought the equivalent of a work from home for 3 hours a day and earn 20,000 dollars a month booklet.

bryan @31: That's an interesting idea, supported by the fact that the spam I see seems to come in waves, with variations. This suggests that every so often a new edition of "Make Money at Home via Email" comes out, gets sold to a bunch of people, they all implement their own variations of the recipes in the book, and perhaps the cleverer ones do A/B testing on variants of the recipes. So I'll see a batch of "The FBI's going to arrest you" variants, then a batch of "I'm dying of cancer and want to send my money to a charity", and so on. Some of the buyers of the books are more persistent than others, so any particular style of letter tends to linger on even after most of the scammers have moved on to the next recipe.

Jeremy, did you really see spam?

No, sorry! And I just did that on 2 threads, didn't I? (What's the emoticon for a sheepish face?)

Jim #28: Ah, I had not thought of your posting in that light... thanks for doing what you can!

The other thing about these predators is they don't actually need a weak victim, if they can catch their victim at a weak moment.

As they say, anyone can fall for the right con, at the right moment. Here at ML, the misspelled 409 scams are entertaining, but I suspect for most of us, Fletcher & Co. strike closer to home.

And everyone has weak periods. I'm dreading that my Mom will get conned as she ages. Probably not by one of these, but there are other categories she might be more vulnerable to, and I'll leave it there. Even for myself -- I'm partly protected by poverty (as in "I can't afford it" is somewhat reflexive), and have a pretty good bullshit meter, but I have my own vulnerabilities too, and even know some of them. ;-)

Probably spaces. Crackers with Speculoos butter? I finally got to the new Trader Joe's yesterday... "near me" across a godawful highway intersection.

Jeremy Leader #32: Some groups may also be coordinated by gang leaders or the equivalent. There's clearly some adaptation to current U.S. conditions, IIRC we've seen waves of house and job spam as those became bigger issues, and disasters get their waves too.

Dave H., #35: Other things that lead to increased gullibility are lack of computer-savvy and a reflexive belief in the probity of Authority. I give daily thanks that my father died when spam was still just about selling crappy products rather than phishing -- all it would have been taken would have been ONE phish e-mail claiming to be from some entity with whom he actually did have an account, and he'd have been as cleaned out as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. After all, why would his bank (or whatever) lie to him?

I'm also curious about whether it's as painful for someone with dyslexia to read these things as it is for me.

Lee #38: Lack of computer-savvy is why I worry about my Mom -- she's pretty canny in RW situations, but on the computer she has real trouble with "modes" and frames, and little sense of "what belongs to who". Somehow she's managed to avoid Trojans so far....

I suspect dyslexics would find them about as frustrating as I find listening to heavily-distorted speech/song.

Jim@23: hadn't heard that particular etymology before, so thanks. But it does raise the issue of why it's a bad thing, rather than a good thing, to be called a "no-mark".

Sandra, I'm afraid I don't know what "no-mark" means. Context?

There are also interesting combinations of those risk factors, too. The elderly mother of a friend of mine nearly sent $16,000 overseas a few months ago, having been fooled by the "Help, I'm stuck in [European country] and my passport and wallet were stolen" scam. The lady whose email account the message came from is also elderly, lives in a rural area and never travels, so Elderly Mother picked up her phone.

Coincidentally, something had gone wrong with Elderly Friend's phone line that day, and when she didn't answer, that confirmed Elderly Mother's fears. My friend and her mother are kind, generous, honest souls, only computer literate enough to check email, and it didn't even occur to them that it might be a scam.

Thankfully someone stopped Elderly Mother before she sent a good chunk of her savings to a scammer, but the incident made it much easier to see how people can be taken in. It doesn't even take stupidity; the right combination of naivete, a false sense of urgency and luck (on the spammer's part) does just as well.

Jim@41: to be a "no-mark" means that you are a person of no great account, though with overtones of wishing that you were, or believing that you are. "I'm not going to the Underbelly tonight. All the bands playing are no-marks." (See also this citation).

Just saw your post Jim. Wow, just wow. I never get such epics in my spam box. What I get is these annoying e-mails saying that my Yahoo e-mail is about to be canceled if I don't contact them---which is read online in my Yahoo mailbox. If there actually was an issue, Yahoo could open up a chat window and tell me about it. Other spam is of the "Men with bigger breasts" variety.

Meanwhile, I have survived 12/21/12, or the world ended and we're all in a simulation of some sort.

I have apparently used Words Of Power. Now, if only I could use them to grow my bank account....

Wyman Cooke @45
Now, if only I could use them to grow my bank account...

Step away from the precipice, Wyman.

Persephone @42, that happened to my mother. It was just plausible enough, and the vile people who run these cons are very, very good at picking up on what's said by their mark to reinforce their story. Mum was totally ready to send a wad of money to what she thought was a police station in Vancouver to free her grandchild from official clutches until she hung up the phone and thought, "This isn't right." And so she called me instead.

I was livid. They didn't get her money, but they made her feel afraid and foolish. It wasn't her fault, and so I told her. There'd been a rash those sorts of calls at the time, it was on the local news so I'd been aware it was happening. Interviews with bewildered elderly people who'd sent their savings off to strangers, thinking they were rescuing a loved one in trouble.

I have no words strong enough to describe what I think of people who would do such things for money.

Teresa (and others) wrote a bunch of Nigerian-scam poetry in this thread from 2005.

I got a genuine 419 letter on paper with a stamp a couple of weeks ago! Maybe I should frame it.

Shortly after Katrina, we entered our household in a listing of available temp crash space for evacuees. Thus we crossed paths with a perpetrator of one of the frequent scams of that situation.

The would-be roommate offered to send us a rent check if we'd specify how much we expected. After I wrote back saying that no rent was required, she vanished from all correspondence.

At the time, I had no clue. Only later did I realize that our correspondent was probably trying to run this sort of scam. The email I received enjoyed better use of the language and her attendant grammar than most examples, but many of the other dots lined up.

Apparently I was gullible enough to fall for it (or at least to not clue in until later), but not interested enough in the bait to suit the scammer's purposes.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little #50: Yeah... there's a formal name for that type (trying to trade a bad check for good money), but it escapes me at the moment. Amusing how it gets foiled by genuine charity.

They're called, quite simply, "Counterfeit Check Scams."