I am in stitches................. Which school do they go to...?? Must be somewhere new and modern in inner London with lots of curricular activities which do not include grammar, spelling and whathaveyou.... It would be hilarious if there weren't enough gullible people in this world to actually fall for something like this...
These scammers command of English is probably far better than you may imagine. The more gullible amongst us are more likely to believe they are genuine if they appear not to have command of our language.
Are you sure Howerd? Personally I find it hard to imagine anyone in the UK falling for this kind of thing, particularly because of the extremely bad attempt at inventing broken English. There are certain natural mistakes that come across when people have a genuine limited competence with English, it is very hard to mimic these natural mistakes if you are indeed a native speaker, so from the patterns used I tend to think that many of these emails probably come from native speakers attempting to sound foreign and not really succeeding.
You have proven my point! These are clearly written by someone with a better command of English than they make out. That may not fool the likes of you and me, who can easily see through the deliberate writing of bad English, but the gullible people will not.
My point is that even the gullible would have a hard time being duped by this fake broken English, you would have to have real problems with your own language to fall for this kind of stuff.
Nigeria, where many of these scams originate, is an English-speaking country and many of the 419 fraudsters are highly-educated, so their poor use of English is very deliberate and aimed particularly at US and UK residents. Clearly, the scammers think their deliberate poor use of English works, otherwise there would be no perceived benefit for them. The latest figures I recall for 419 fraud in the UK were £150 million and around 5,000 victims per year; so, a lot of people are not put off by the 'poor' English and many of those scammed, according to the OFT, are well-educated individuals. The same OFT report indicates that 10-20% of scam victims are susceptible to the same scam again, so lessons are not learned in many cases. You would not expect that someone with such a command of our language as Polly Toynbee to 'scammed' but she got taken in, hook, line and sinker, sending £200 to an 'African child' who wrote a letter asking for money to complete her studies after her parents died from a flesh-eating bug. Ms Toynbee promptly sent off a cheque. The scammers not only cashed her cheque but then attempted to empty her bank account as well - using the perfect signature and bank account number they now had in their possession!
The Polly Toynbee one was not the 419 scam but I do take your point. I've been receiving 419 style emails pretty much as long as I can remember, at least since the late 90's and I've had personal email since the early 90's via CIX and Compuserve, never ever been remotely tempted, I find it remarkable that anyone falls for it.
Here's one reason people fall for these scams... Suppose you advertise your car on the internet? Well, almost every offer you get to buy will probably be from a scammer. The scammer send you a cheque for way over the asking price so that you can pay a freight company to deliver the car to him. You receive the cheque and deposit it into your bank account. The scammer calls you to ask if the cheque has cleared and you call the bank who confirm it has. The scammer then asks you to forward the excess monies to the freight company by Western Union. You happily oblige because the cheque has cleared! But, wait a moment, the cheque may have cleared but that does not mean the cheque is not a forgery or a stolen cheque! A few days later the bank discovers the fraud and promptly removes all the money from your account! You are gullible because you don't understand the banking system and the difference between a cheque being 'cleared' and being 'given value'. Cheques may take weeks to be 'given value', especially if drawn on an overseas account!
I am aware of the underlying mechanics of cheques and yes I also know that most people are not aware of exactly how cheques work. Personally all car transactions I have ever been involved in, I either required cash or a bank certified cheque (bankers draft) even that's not a 100% safe. Also I don't think selling a car on the net is quite as risky as you make out my colleagues have often sold cars on ebay and via other internet mechanisms, cash is often involved at the conclusion of the deal
I still have a letter sent to me from one of our operators in Nigeria when I was there. Nigerians write English in a very flowery way with far too many adjectives etc. It is easy to see if you are familiar with it. The scammer could be Nigerian in the above post, but that name doesn't look Nigerian to me. I could be wrong though, I frequently am
There is a host of "modalities" coming from a 419 scamming community. Nothing is sacred for them in the quest to get money out of the gullible. I do admit that sometime, it takes an extra educated person to be able to write such half coherent sentences on purpose, but on the whole, we also have to admit that if some people weren't greedy to the point of stupidity, we wouldn't have a problem as big as this. I get stuff like that every day, and sometime, rarely, I pass it on to www.419eater.com, but I am slowly getting bored and wish they wouldn't hit my junk box at all. Because it shows that still lots of gullibility exists for the scammers to trhive on.
The problem is that a lot of people think cleared funds mean the monies is theirs Blank Bankers Drafts are sometimes stolen, so certainly the funds are no 'guaranteed' When I sold my car in 2006 I advertised it on specialist car sites. I was, frankly, inundated by 419 fraudsters wanting my car. I only got one genuine enquiry, who luckily bought the car and he saw the advert in the local press. So, my internet advert did not illicit a single genuine enquiry. You can read about the fun I had with one of these 419 fraudsters who wanted to buy my car here... http://thescambaiter.com/forum/showthread.php?t=74389
