Just as the FBI puts out its holiday cyberscam warning today, I get a doozy.
The email began with “Greetings. I am Mr. Alfa Abu, a chief security guard to Saif al-Islam Muammar al-Gaddafi.” Sure you are!
“He is the first son of Muammar Gaddafi,” it continued, “who is now late.” He means dead.
“In the heat of the revolution in Libya, he entrusted in my care Gold and Raw Diamond that worth several millions of Dollar.” Sure he did!
“I need the help of a foreign partner who I can move this items to for safety.” I’ll bet you do!
Dude signed it “Abu Alfa,” but his email address is frankoffice2@gmail.com. How dare he — or she — send this message to a New Yorker? We know how to bend the three-card Monte cards by the age of 6. We smell a con artist a block away. Hell, we elect con artists!
“It’s really despicable,” says Jenny Shearer, the FBI’s spokeswoman for the Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3. “These people are opportunists, and they’re looking for vulnerable targets.”
They seem generous enough at first, but man, do they need grammar lessons! In another email I received, David Owen said he was with the First Commercial Bank of London and wanted to give me $2.7 million, because he didn’t want the money “of my deceased client been inherited by people that doesn't know anything about him.” Like I do?
Martins Jojor wanted to send me $650,000 “so that we can share the joy after all the sufferness ” – without saying how we had suffernessed together.
Madam Ngozie Iwuala wanted to wire me $1.4 million dollars — “in US $195 bills.”
And Suncoastgirl2@yahoo in Japan for some reason pretended to be from the Ivory Coast, offering me $8.7 million because “my mother died when I was 6 and since then my father took me so special.” I don’t even want to go there, but I hope Suncoastgirl does take ESL classes soon.
Disasters always bring a spike in cyberscams, said Shearer, like the one I got from “Mr. Cristian Alberto” saying, “I lost my entire family in Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and now death is knocking on my door step and I have $59 million and nobody to inherit it.”
“I don’t know why people do bad things,” Shearer said. “This summer we announced an online cyberfraud of auto sales on eBay, in which criminals pretended to be a mother whose son was killed in the war and she wanted to sell his car cheap and fast because she couldn’t bear to look at it.”
There was no car, but several people were taken in by the tragic, though fake, story and lost thousands.
The holidays are also a peak time for e-scams, and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3.gov) today posted a list of tips for safe online shopping, including how to avoid gift-card scams.
“If you are being solicited to buy a discount gift card from some website, be cautious, you might be paying for something that doesn't exist,” said Shearer. “It’s probably safest to get gift cards from the merchant itself.
“On all this, We like to say, ‘If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.’ ”
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