Nigerian Scam gets smarter gravitates to subscription services

The email Nigerian Scam which purports to send $m to ‘you’ has gravitated to subscription sites and I experienced it first hand.

We’ve all received, seen or heard of the emails that are from ‘a professional business person’ who used to work for ‘a minister/rich person/royal family member’ and have suddenly come into a lot of money that they need to wash and you are just the person to receive $8.5m of which you’ll be able to keep 10%. And all you have to do is send £300-500 to this address and we’ll be in touch….

Well, when I first received one of these… for that nano-second while I was working out 10%, my head wasn’t in gear. Then once it had moved on to nanosecond number two, the brain kicked in and reality said ‘Don’t be stupid!’ As much as you want to feel important nobody gives away anything so put brain and mind into gear and delete the email. Now the ‘Nigerian email scam’, as it became known, is spotted by spam engines and filtered out so the stupidity of the email and any reaction are removed.

However, it just elevated to a new level. And I saw it in action first hand.

As an agency we use various sites where we receive sales leads of companies wanting marketings services. Last week we purchased one of these leads, from a reputable on-line service. I responded to the lead and by return email, which in itself was a surprise and just a little bit too quick (normally responses don’t happen for at least a week while the client reads and evaluates) got a resposne and request for more information.

The email I received back said that to receive the detailed project specification in confidentiality I must register with the company’s lawyers and an email address was provided for contact .

Again, not the norm because on an open quoting site confidentiality is rare as the project has been posted for quotes for anybody to read. I checked out the email address and it was from a web site which looked legit and for arguments sake I’ll call them ‘online-solicitors.usa‘, because they themselves might have been scammed. So while two events had made me slightly interested, not suspicious just yet, I sent off an email asking what information was required.

Bingo

The next day I receive an email from ‘the lawyer’ saying: “Apologies I was out of the office. Best to contact me on my yahoo email address”.

That was concern number one. Why would a reputable lawyer apologise for a delay of 24 hours? Why would he want me to use his Yahoo address?

Concern number two followed shortly after, grammar and tying was… suspect and very reminiscent of the Nigerian Scam emails:

“Hello Mr …

I am a chief contract project lawyer for the {spoof company name was here} Bank Project

i shall be handling your registration Process.”

Concern number three “Bank Project”. Oh,  oh. A bank eh? Oh yeah?

Concern number three:

Tucked away in the middle of the information required were these two little gems:

“Bank Account Information including sort code :

Non- Refundable registration Fee of : 350 British Pounds.”

Oh yes the sucker punch line.

So after reporting them to the lead site as a ‘Nigerian Scam’ I did a bit of investigation.

The emails sent from ‘the client’ and ‘the lawyer’ were both sent on Yahoo. The IP addresses they were sent from were based on the same email server bank. And yes, these emails servers were based in Nigeria!

So after patting myself on the back and letting all the companies involved know I just had to pen this blog.

Please tweet, digg, facebook whatever you can. The more people that read about this the better.  Nigerian Scam emails are widespread and still catch out the on-line community that are ‘web unaware’, this application of the scam is not as well known. I’m sure I’m not the first to experience this but I would like to be the last!

You can read this and ‘like’ on my facebook page and retweet/follow on my twitter account @marlxkr