Nigerian Scams

I've noticed a huge uptake in Nigerian Scam emails this month - 24 so far. Anyone else getting an unusually large number of these things? At least half of them claim to come from, you guessed it, Nigeria, which seemed to go out of fashion for a while. I'm also getting a lot of fake overseas lotto email.

419 Eater and 419 Baiter. 419 Baiter is starting to become NSFW

419 is the Toledo area code, and it always makes me think we had something to do with it :P

If I have gotten any they've been caught by my spam filters. I first got that scam through snail mail.

I got a couple snail mail ones in college. My spam filter catches them, but I sort through the spam looking for them since I think they're kind of an interesting phenomenon.

i get a lot from "kofi nana". it kind of amuses me, like people would think, "oh, kofi nana, that must be like kofi annan, whom i know is both african (it's possible that he is the only living african many americans could name off the top of their heads) & trustworthy!"

i also like the ones from suha arafat. oh, suha.

heh, my roommate nearly fell victim. one of our other roommates was moving out, so the still-staying roommate posted an ad on (of all) places, craigslist. she got a reply from some girl in the UK that wanted to get the place before she moved here for school. a few days later i asked to see the e-mail that she had gotten just to get some sort of idea what this person might be like. it's a good thing i DID ask to see it, because a couple clues instantly jumped the hell up in my face:

1.) email address was in the format of [email protected]

2.) nobody wanted to SEE the place

3.) this girl claimed to be coming to Boston to go to Emerson, yet the e-mail absolutely REEKED of an incredibly bad interpretation of the English language. HMMMMM.....

4.) i had confirmed to myself that something fish was going on when i noticed that this person wanted to make payment for the room with a travelers check in excess amount, to have the remainder sent back.

i'm a little bit too lazy to go into any more detail.

don't cash the check, if you ever find yourself in this situation. banks are not legally responsible. unfortunately, you are, 100%.

these motherfuckers are EVERYWHERE. my roommate actually ended up getting somewhere around 16 or 17 different, although remarkably similar emails in this fashion.

When I put an old car up on ebay I got an email about how they were going to send me a check for the car with excess to be given to someone who would pick it up and deliver it to the UK.
The two very odd and obvious things were: They never wanted to SEE it and it was a 93 celica.. not exactly something you'd search the states over for.. only to have it shipped to the UK .....

wow. 26 is a lot. I think I just got one email this month but the spam filter does filter out a lot of these I think.

OTOH I got 2 via myspace mail. D'oh.

BTW this site collects all of the emails: