It is common to find an email in your junk mail or inbox from a sender you haven’t heard from before.  Out of curiosity, you would like to open and read it just to see if it came from a distant relative or a previous acquaintance who might be trying to get in touch with you for some reason or another.

Contents of These Nigerian Emails

The email starts out apologetically about bothering your privacy.  And following the same line, the email courteously outlines a story about an individual who may or may not be familiar to the recipient, leaving a huge amount of money somewhere in Nigeria or South Africa.  Towards the end the email, it would outline a plan where the money would be transferred to you with additional sentences extolling the virtues that made you a logical choice as a beneficiary and all.  Then the latter portion of the email would talk about procedures or steps the email recipient has to take to be able to start the transfer of funds.  Most of them would even leave their names and contact information for you to get hold of a person and verify the claims made on that email if you wish to do so.

On other instances, emails will come in the form of lottery news claiming that you won a big prize through an electronic raffle that their company hosts regularly.  They would advise emailing back to confirm your acknowledgment with more or less similar instructions on how you could get your winnings credited to your account.

A recipient might see variations of these emails or fax messages, but the common ingredients are that it involves a great deal of money from a deceased person and action is required on the recipient to shell out a smaller amount to be able to get them.  To any average Joe and Jane, this is a rare opportunity to be able to fulfill their dreams of becoming rich quickly and painlessly.  Or so they thought.

Scams Alright

The plot thickens because after some time of deleting them, the letters seem to come in with another similar story.  To law firms who’ve been host to calls for help on setting up offshore accounts to accommodate these emails, it is plain to see that there is probably something illegal going on like money laundering, but how can you launder money that does not exist?  But what these scammers do is start bleeding the poor guy dry with more fund requests to cover taxes, bonds, bank charges, etc.  The poor victim cooperates until they have nothing more to give and realize they lost more in the process.

With the way these scam emails and faxes have been going around, an astute observer could just imagine a highly-organized company which could even be backed by the Nigerian government.  Some scammers even have the nerve to post a free email address.  Come to think of it, a lottery that could give up hundreds of thousands of dollars as cash prize but can’t afford to purchase its own domain name, is that not suspicious enough?

Next time you receive one, just delete them.  That simple click of the mouse will do you more good.