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.

Nigeria: Responding to Dan Primack's Atrocious Stereotype

Also previously published at NigeriansTalk.org with the same title.

Taking the hatchet to the hack

Very little upsets me but what cannot be countenanced is mediocrity masquerading as professionalism where clichés are allowed to get in the way of expected originality and the package does not contain what it says on the box.

In that sense you realise you have been scammed, swindled, defrauded and outwitted by a hoodlum, you could forgive yourself for being that silly but hoodlums with pens writing for popular magazines are dangerous and outrageously atrocious at best.

In my Twitter timeline I came across a number of exchanges that pertained to the pejorative use of Nigerian with the word Scam and a version 2.0 as if it was describing a more sophisticated scam that had emerged out of Nigeria and had been noticed by a hack writing for the National Enquirer or some sensationalist village rag until my search found that he wrote for Fortune.com.

The label and contents differ

There is definitely no reason for me to read Dan Primack’s Term Sheet apart from probably to redline it and award a fail but this perked my interest, Nigerian scam 2.0: Would you like to buy some Facebook shares? [1] and naturally, it was worth reading up on because I have written a few blogs on how social engineering is used to scam people.

Beyond the title, I could find nothing within the text of the published material that referred to Nigeria; in fact, it was in the comments that followed that the author tried to project a rotten stereotype that would make similar rotten and lazy epithets as Muslim Terrorists or Gay Paedophile sound tame.

We know Muslims in general are not terrorists and probably on a larger scale terrorist is a broader global thing hardly defined by religion, just as paedophiles are not necessarily gay and it probably covers all sexualities of adults abusing children – in the same vein, whilst scams might have come out of Nigeria, most scams are hardly Nigerian in origin despite the unfair slant of the media in castigating groups for the benefit of the subjective and sensational.

Link to link, story to story

The hack referenced two articles in his absurd copy, an Investor Alert [2] send out by the SEC and a Judgement Order [3] in favour of the SEC.

This little piece of analysis lead me down a rabbit’s warren of more references related to something completely contrary to the title and not one mention of Nigeria in the following articles.

Randy M. Cho according to the judgement order had been at his pre-IPO scamming business since 2001 where he had fleeced “at least $3.7 million from at least 45 investors in four states.” For the record, the states are geographical entities within the United States of America and these were about “expected initial public offerings of those companies, including Centerpoint, AOL/Time Warner, Inc., Google, Inc., Facebook, Inc. and Rosetta Stone, Inc.”

Searching for the remotest Nigerian

In the Investor Alert, we have more URLs that I also reviewed for anything that might remotely refer to Nigeria in the slightest.

FINRA Investor Alert: "Pre-IPO Offerings – These Scammers Are Not Your Friends"

The references are about the judgement obtained against Randy M. Cho whose name bears no resemblance to even uncommon Nigerian names and it even suggests you check the Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator just in case you are being conned by a criminal but this is within the extents of the United States.

Risky Business: “Pre-IPO” Investing

The helpful authorities then offered an example of a pre-IPO scam featuring a McWhortle Enterprises, Inc. which is based in the large premises of a private mail bag in Washington DC.

For someone who provides “The latest on private equity, M&A, deals and movements — from Wall Street to Silicon Valley”; his byline, one would have expected he would be informative about these scams and at least help people identify if they are being scammed but that would be too much work for a bottom-feeder of yellow journalism whose sensationalist copy sadly belittles those who accept his stuff with any sense of seriousness.

The failure to inform

The links below would have allowed the hack to ascend the steps of mediocrity to a semblance of amateur, it would be effusive praise to suggest professional.

Questions You Should Ask About Your Investments

Internet Fraud

FINRA - FINRA Warns of Facebook-Linked Pre-IPO Scams

How I wish Facebook were a Nigerian company creating such excitement for pre-IPO offerings that make fools part with their money at the sound of something almost too good to be true.

FINRA - Fighting Fraud 101: Smart Tips for Older Investors

Amazingly, even in this well written piece to the seniors, not one mention is made of Nigerians, rather, it simply asks that people note certain traits and characteristics because there are honest Nigerians who are involved in the financial markets, doing a job and helping their clients make good money in a marketplace that is properly regulated by the financial authorities anywhere they might be operating from.

Not anymore

A slight like this must not go unchallenged, only Dan Primack links pre-IPO scams to Nigerians, the Wikipedia reference to Nigerian Scams does not once link this activity to IPOs, the link is tenuous, contrived, lazy, atrocious, stupid and without foundation.

It goes without say that any advice that comes from the likes of Dan Primack should be taken with a pinch of salt or even a spoon of salt and immediately spat out as fantasy presaging possible fraud if he cannot apply himself to expected research and analysis required of people who have a platform like he has.

Nigerians are just not going to roll over and be kicked about by such people anymore; you picked the wrong kind of stereotype to push your irresponsible tripe.

Sources

[1] Nigerian scam 2.0: Would you like to buy some Facebook shares? - The Term Sheet: Fortune's deals blog

[2] Investor Alert: Pre-IPO Investment Scams

[3] Randy M. Cho: SEC v. Randy M. Cho, Civil Action No. 09-CV-6261 (USDC) (N.D.Ill.)

Certifying gullibility in Nigeria

Great opportunities in Nigeria

Somehow, I have always had a sixth sense about when a scam is in the offing. This goes back long way when I was a service technician in the eighties with an IT services firm in Nigeria which had very good initiation ideas but got run down by the happy-go-luck lifestyle of the owners. Quite sad.

I owe a lot in my career to the foothold IT Systems Limited gave me into IT and other interesting things I when on to do with high volume desktop publishing with Deji Sasegbon & Co Publishers who published the Nigerian Supreme Court Cases in 30-something volumes then using PCs and Xerox Ventura Publisher which put us well beyond the work Gani Fawehinmi was doing with older publishing methods.

Almost dazzled with red mercury

So, this interesting day, we got a call that from an office in a Lagos suburb of Ketu to help them fix computers. Hardly had I gotten there, another man arrived trying to get us interested in some deal that involved red mercury and turning black pieces of paper into wet 10 Naira notes.

Red mercury has always been the stuff of unbelievable myths, enough to engage and where you lose your guard you are done.

Somehow, he had 4 million of those notes that he had to pick up from the airport and he needed financial assistance to acquire more red mercury to process the notes, I was to raise 10,000 Naira and would eventually end up with 4 million Naira.

Now, would sound incredible to anyone, but I just knew within me that nobody makes money that easily except in a lottery, the danger was that once the deal was completed, there was so much at stake that rather than flying with the mile-high club, one would steady six feet under with the inheritors being the partners in the crime.

I walked away and thankfully, I had left no details about myself with them, now, in Europe, I would have been off to the police, in Nigeria, it was best to pretend nothing had happened live your life in peace.

Same crime different medium

So, when I started getting emails pertaining to the Advanced Fee Fraud – 419 scams, it did not take too much to realise this was variation on my earlier experience.

Unfortunately, many are too wide-eyed with gullibility to some extent, greed in others and plain foolish having suspended reason for fantasy, they get their fingers burnt and are fleeced of the pennies and pounds they have saved up all their lives.

Nigeria now has an anti-graft agency called the EFCC, this somehow strikes fear into those who cannot account for how that have come into so much wealth. Sometimes, it is as if everyone is a Cinderella with a fairy god mother who waves the wand and the next day you are rolling in money like it is going out of fashion.

There are many who are getting hounded justly to account in much more detail about the provenance of their wealth, some have even fled the country to avoid being apprehended, but the interesting part to it is how many of the old hands on the oil tiller are getting implicated by these investigations.

An instrument for bias?

Despite all this, the agency is susceptible to accusations of bias and the possibility of being used as a political tool for people who can pull strings in the agency like to Presidency to get at political opponents.

A number of cases have arisen where Nigerian citizens nabbed for money laundering abroad and rather than the Nigerian exercise the kind of interest that would allow for those cases to be dealt with in Nigerian courts and under our justice system, our Attorney General gets carted off to argue cases to keep those culprits abroad.

That ploy has in cases backfired because sometimes foreign justice systems would rather not wade into the murky waters of explaining the intricate matters of the Nigerian constitution or do the dirty work of other vested interests.

The Emperor’s funny certificates

Anyway, what is most interesting is that another scam as a result of the work of this agency is now being perpetrated; some people are issuing corruption-free certificates very much like one might get with a credit reference.

Some people are buying these certificates which they hope would be some sort of absolution testimonial when seeking political office or engaging in some business activity.

Well, what can I say? Does having a corruption-free certificate give me the confidence to deal with someone who has been so easily fooled?

This is the stuff the Emperor’s new clothes is made of and whoever came up with that idea must be both enterprising and a nasty crook, just as we have been educated this week about pretexting with regards to the investigation of Hewlett Packard directors, the clever crooks have been pretexting as EFCC officials with the authority to issue certificates which might be about being corruption-free but that does not make the recipient incorruptible.

Like with every scam, a fool and his money are soon parted.