posted on September 9, 2004 08:24:54 AM new
Hi, all. For some comic relief, read this newspaper column, written by a friend of ours. It gets funnier as you read down the page. ~Adele
Wasatch Rambler: Scampering among scammers and scrambling their scams
Tue, Sep 7, 2004
Find a computer today and go to this web site: http://www.quatloos.com/brad_christensen.htm.
It is the funniest thing I've seen in years.
Everyone with e-mail gets, at some point, a plea from a poor soul in Nigeria who has selected them, personally, out of the whole world, to help move $100 million or so out of that country. All he needs is your name and financial information. In return you get 30 percent, a tidy sum.
It's a complete fake, of course, a total rip-off, a scam.
The letters come from Nigeria, mostly. Formerly faxed, now the Internet is full of them. The hope is that greedy Americans will bite and, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, they do.
How do they rob you? At some point the scammers always ask you for money, either to show faith, to activate an account, bribe an official, or something.
Never, ever, buy in to such an offer. You will lose your money. You could die. Americans who go to Nigeria to close these deals have been blackmailed and killed.
The law can't touch these scammers, which is where Brad Christensen, at the above Web site, comes in. I found him while helping a reader with another fraud question and was fascinated.
What Brad does is scam the scammers. He strings them along by making them believe he wants in on their deal. He even agrees to meet them in distant cities that he picks, but of course never goes himself.
Occasionally, they bite.
I ran Brad down in Phoenix where he works as a communications director for an engineering company, but scamming scammers is his true genius.
I about fell out of my chair laughing while reading his correspondence with them.
He poses as a variety of things: a rich restaurant owner, a founder of a religion ("The Almighty Church of the First Cousin of Noah", a simpleton obsessed with silly details, or whatever, but always rich and always anxious to go along. The scammers' greed makes them tolerate this nonsense.
"My first one was with a guy named George Adams from South Africa, and I had him go to London twice, and I never showed up," he said. "I told him I didn't get there because I was allergic to foliage and accidentally drove by some trees.
"One time I was going to meet one in Lisbon, Portugal, and of course I didn't show up. When they asked what happened I told them I caught the wrong plane and was in Lisbon, North Dakota, living in the Dairy Queen. I gave them the number of the Dairy Queen." Which they called, of course.
His success has inspired others. "There's a whole cottage industry," scamming Nigerian scammers, he said, which is only fair because working these scams is, by one report, Nigeria's third largest industry. Even government officials there take part.
"My goal is to drive these people out of business, they are a pox on the economy of Nigeria," he said. Also, he admits, he'd like to write a book and get rich himself.
Why not? It's a great idea. I wish I'd thought of it first.
In fact, maybe I did, and if he's willing to send me $10 million, I'll split it with him.
A lovely primer on these schemes, and many others, can be found at the Secret Service web site: http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml.
Wasatch Rambler is the opinion of Charles Trentelman. You can reach him at 625-4232, or e-mail at [email protected].
posted on September 9, 2004 12:01:52 PM new
Check out this similar site! http://www.ebolamonkeyman.com/
I've used his letter to scammers myself whenever I get a request for urgent financial assistance! Funnily enough I never hear back from them!
, a simpleton obsessed with silly details, or whatever, but always rich and always anxious to go along. The scammers' greed makes them tolerate this nonsense.
