Social Engineering: For the avoidance of Mrs Mary Williams

This is not for me

I just got an email with the subject Dear Customer: I would presume whoever is addressing me does not know my name; the email portends to be from MoneyGram with the email address of money326@msn.com which immediately indicates that it is really not from MoneyGram.

I will humour myself by reading the email and you will find my comments inline in parentheses, it will just pertain to the content of the email, I will not do much technical analysis to ascertain the genuineness of this email.

From Office Of The Money Gram Money Transfer. Accra-Ghana Republic / Address No 450 Ring Road Accra-Ghana.

[Now, I would have thought this would come from the office of the MoneyGram Money Transfer Bureau, emphasis on Bureau, which might be in Accra but is it not the Republic of Ghana?]

Appearances of deception

Website:WWW.money-gram.com/

[The genuine MoneyGram Money Transfer website is http://www.moneygram.com the one in this email does not exist.]

Phone:+233244841003.

[Yes, that is a Ghanaian phone number but I doubt I will be calling it.]

Email: mg179435@w.cn

[Now, I have a second email address and this is in a Chinese domain.]

Dear Customer:

[These people do not know me, here again I am being addressed as Dear Customer.]

The letter

Be inform[ed] that we have been giving [given] and [an] instruction by, Hon Ado Seth, DP Ministry of Finance Accra Ghana to start sending to you $5000usd everyday through money gram money transfer, Until your total amount sum ( $1.2 Million us Dollars, AID FUND) one million two hundred thousand united state dollars is completely transferred to your custody .

[I really cannot be bothered with correcting this, too many errors in this paragraph, I could do with a transfer of $5,000 into my custody and eventually my bank account everyday but I will settle for Paypal donations to made though clicking on the Donate button at the top right of this blog.

But read this, I am over a period of 240 days supposed to receive the sum of $1.2 million in daily deposits of $5,000; I suppose a vulture is a patient bird but I doubt it will wait for the egg to be laid, incubated, hatched and the full lifecycle of the bird to carcass before it feeds.

The poor Ghanaians whose aid pornography pictures have moved aid agencies to sympathy to donate to their plight are not going to get sight of the aid, it is about to be drip-fed $5,000 a time into the account of Dear Customer, Yours Truly.]

Affected by an avoidance

Today our department have affected [Why can’t they avoid affording the misuse of affected for effected?] your first transfer of $5000usd to your name, Transfer Reference below.

[Indeed, they need to be reminded of my name which they never knew before.]

Sender First Name=Dr Victor

Sender Second Name =Ike

Amount=$5000.00 USD

Question=Code

Answer=233.

[Who is Dr Victor Ike?]

Contact Dr Victor Ike, Foreign Operation Manager on the below address, to issue to you, your Fund Clearance Certificate and give to you your Money Gram Transfer Control Number to pick-up your first payment of $5000 us dollars.

[So, Hon Ado Seth (Don’t be deceived by titles, this man is hardly Honourable by any stretch of the imagination.) in corrupt enterprise with Dr Victor Ike are in this together and looking further down, the latter is the Foreign Operation(s) Manager at MoneyGram in Ghana – Interesting.]

Dr Victor Ike{Foreign Operation Manager Money Gram Accra Ghana}

E-mail {mg179435@w.cn}

[And though he works in Ghana he has a Chinese email address.]

Tell-+233244841003.

She’s a scammer

Cheers

Mrs Mary Williams.

[Mary Williams? Cheers? Maybe I am being pedantic here but you cannot without knowing me end up closing an apparently formal letter with Cheers. Who the heck is Mrs Mary Williams and to what do I owe this random windfall from three unknown people in Ghana?]

Like they say, if it is too good to be true, it probably isn’t worth your while. To close, I just attempted a search on Mrs Mary Williams and before I finished typing, the suggestion of “Mrs Mary Williams email” was offered by Google and well, she appears to have a reputation for scamming people.

Mrs Mary Williams, please go take a running jump off Fort Elmina, you’ll be doing yourself the greatest favour.

Nigerian scammers will always be a minority

Those rotten Nigerians

One is saddened to read that 87 Nigerians have been arrested in Spain on suspicion of defrauding at least 1,500 in a postal and internet lottery scam.

In the light of my last blog, these are the kind of people who make our inadvertent commission of being ambassadors of Nigeria a very difficult job.

They put us in inappropriate spotlight that many who do not have an alternative identity have to try harder at proving honesty, capability, eligibility and trustworthiness.

Be smart about scams

I have received many letters saying I have been put into some lottery and I have won a prize but for me to gain access to the prize I have to pay some administration fee to some agent engaged by the lottery firm.

I do not think you have to be too smart to see that there is something fishy about such a proposition, the news story indicates thousands of these letters and emails are written in ungrammatical English.

The question would then be why a “reputable” lottery organisation would engage an unprofessional outfit to manage lottery winnings that probably would reflect badly on their enterprise.

In it to win it

My view of lotteries is simple; you have to be in it to win it, and every lottery I have won has been because I consciously entered in that competition with the hope that my numbers or ticket would come up and win the grand prize or some other prize.

Where lotteries are managed on the Internet, especially in the Netherlands, you have the option to include both your address and bank account number so any winnings go directly into your bank account without the need of an agent.

In fact, the whole scheme of this scam looks quite wrong headed, whilst the administration of winnings might be a costly exercise, informing the winner directly of their winnings should not be too cumbersome.

Most people who register in competitions have the option to opt-out of having their details passed on to agents, if a lottery firm outsources this service, one would expect that the letter or email informing a person of winnings would bear all the official hallmarks of the lottery organisation at first.

No need to pay

Then, the lottery organisation would have paid the agency to handle the winnings, the agency should not then have to charge the winner any administration fees because a percentage of the winnings should have gone to covering the cost of administration – a winner should never have to pay administration costs.

Another question is how a lottery expects to break-even if it randomly chooses non-contributing participants from an email list, I do not believe there is some bottomless cash pool somewhere where someone derives joy from giving money to unknown strangers and then requires them to pay up to get paid.

The Caribbean for one

I remember one prize I won in 1992 before the Internet was popular which was for a 1-week cruise in the Caribbean, but living in the UK I had to pay a fortune to get to the Caribbean and then probably end up as a stowaway on some pirate’s vessel.

It did not take long for me to realise I was being taken for a ride and about to be scammed, I do not do stressful lottery wins, much as a Caribbean cruise for one could never have been any fun at all, the devil is always in the detail processed by a logical brain. The same scam is now rehashed for another medium.

The logic usually does not add up, eventually, the old saying catches up on the deluded or desperate that has been cajoled into a despicable enterprise – it only takes 1 out 1,000 fools answering to make a profit.

The old saying is – A fool and his money are soon parted – if you have not expressly entered a lottery you cannot seriously expect to have won anything and you should not believe you have won anything.

We are good Nigerians

Meanwhile, shame on all those Nigerians, I do hope that the full force of the law is visited upon them and we who keep on the good side of the law continue to prove that those shameful miscreants are the exception rather than the rule.

Most Nigerians abroad are engaged in meaningful activities that build economies, communities and relationships, we who take our ambassadorial jobs seriously would not relent in being the good and exemplary Nigerian.