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Worst Scam Ever
Dec. 8th, 2005 07:39 pm"URGENT ASSISTANCE NEEDED!" Once again, I had been sent a hugely important email - this time it was apparently from a lawyer who had been the personal attorney to David Jet, who worked with the Shell Petroleum Development Company in the UK. He and his entire family died in some way that I didn't read, leaving the $6 million he had in his account to no one in particular, so naturally the attorney chose the professional route of giving most of it to Random Person On The Internet.
Now, I didn't really want to mention this until I had a decently large set of emails to present, but he's already excelled himself. I haven't included the actual text of the emails because there's nothing really spectacular in there apart from the bizarre grammar mistakes.
After two seconds of research, it emerged that Shell only call themselves the "Shell Petroleum Development Company" in Nigeria. This didn't exactly come as a shock to me, but I was still surprised at just how transparent the scam was. Nevertheless I emailed him back under the name of Leonard Bucket (no far-flung cult stories this time) and waited to see if he'd respond again.
And respond he did. In fact, he was even so good as to provide a scan of his passport as proof of his identity.
I can just about let past his thinking that MS Painted text looked remotely convincing if the JPG was compressed enough. You might even be able to forgive him for pasting it so badly on to the machine-readable part at the bottom. But to go on a random image search and come up with a photo of an inanely grinning Des O'Connor, then proudly affix it to your false passport... it takes true genius.
Now, I didn't really want to mention this until I had a decently large set of emails to present, but he's already excelled himself. I haven't included the actual text of the emails because there's nothing really spectacular in there apart from the bizarre grammar mistakes.
After two seconds of research, it emerged that Shell only call themselves the "Shell Petroleum Development Company" in Nigeria. This didn't exactly come as a shock to me, but I was still surprised at just how transparent the scam was. Nevertheless I emailed him back under the name of Leonard Bucket (no far-flung cult stories this time) and waited to see if he'd respond again.
And respond he did. In fact, he was even so good as to provide a scan of his passport as proof of his identity.
I can just about let past his thinking that MS Painted text looked remotely convincing if the JPG was compressed enough. You might even be able to forgive him for pasting it so badly on to the machine-readable part at the bottom. But to go on a random image search and come up with a photo of an inanely grinning Des O'Connor, then proudly affix it to your false passport... it takes true genius.
