Saturday, May 3, 2008

E-mail Scams

I received this e-mail yesterday:

I am william simon,I decided to contact you alone directly. I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer .It has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and Right now, I have only about a few months to live and I want you to Distribute my funds fifty-eight million dollars$58,000,000(united states dollars) to charities. i have set aside 20% for you and your family.

The subject line read "Charity". Ummm. Iam so glad I am not stupid. But it makes me wonder how many people would respond to this type thing. What they ultimately want is your bank account number or social security number so they can steal your money and/or identity.

I had a friend I worked with last year that had been corresponding with a guy for about a year. She met him through an online dating site and thought they had a good online relationship. After all this correspondance he told her he wanted to help her out because she has a hard time making ends meet. He sent her $3,000 in money orders. There were several, I dont remember how many but they totaled up to this amount. He told her to use them as she needed but to just send $1,000 to his sister in another state. Of course she had to cash them first. They were US Postal Money Orders. She was very excited about this. I found it hard to believe. They looked very real. But when she took them to the post office they told her they were counterfeit. She hasnt heard from this guy since and even though she gave the postal service all the information she had on this guy nothing ever came of it.

I have heard of both of the scams on the news. And this is not the first e-mail like the one above that I have ever gotten. These people spend a lot of time sucking people into their little trap and I am sure that sometimes they are successful.

I copied and pasted that e-mail. Look at all the errors in the thing. I corrected some of the spacing because some of the words were ran together. Anybody that has $58,000,000 surely has spell check and certainly should be able to do better than that. They must not be smarter than a 5th grader.

I e-mailed the guy back and told him to die and go to hell.

Just thought I would share. LOL