As we all know by now, the Nigerian letter scam is the name for a type of scam in which you are told that under some pretense you are to receive a huge amount of money for doing next to nothing.  Of course, once you correspond with the sender of the email, you soon learn that it takes payment after payment from you under various guises in order to receive the money and, of course, ultimately, you receive nothing, but the scammer has managed to trick you out of your money.  Here is a copy of such an email that I recently received:

“Dear Friend ,

How are you? I am sorry but happy to inform you about my success in getting those funds transferred under the co-operation of a new partner from Kosovo though I tried my best to involve you in the business but God decided the whole situations.  Presently I am in Kosovo for investment projects with my own share of the total sum. Meanwhile, I did not forget your past efforts and attempts to assist me in transferring those funds despite that it failed us somehow.

Now contact my little friend in South Africa his name is. Mr. Betrand Thando On his e-mail address; mr.betrandthando@yahoo.com  Ask him to send you the total sum of $400.000.00 (four hundred thousand usd) which i kept for your compensation for all the past efforts and attempts to assist me in this matter. I appreciated your efforts at that time very much. So feel free and get in touch with my little friend. And instruct him where to send the amount to you. Please do let me know immediately you receive it so that we can share the joy after all the sufferness at that time.  In the moment, I am very busy here because of the investment projects which I and the new partner are having at hand, finally, remember that I had forwarded instruction to my friend on your behalf to receive that money, so feel free to get in touch with him he will send the amount to you without any delay.

Thanks,
Miss. Bea.”

TIPS

This email is typical of many others and filled with poor grammar and punctuation.  In this case, the letter even speaks of previous dealings which certainly cannot be true. The story is utterly preposterous.  So who would possibly fall for this?  Only the truly gullible and that is the very strategy used by these scammers.  They do not want to waste their time on people who might eventually see through their scam so they make their plea as outrageous as possible so that if someone takes the bait, they are likely to be able to cheat that person out of their money.

By now, we all know that no one is giving you something for nothing and even the most gullible among us must ask themselves, why they were singled out for such good fortune.  The answer is that this is a scam and the best thing you can do is to enjoy the humor of these emails, but never respond to them