Today’s Scam of the day comes from a regular Scamicide reader and is another version of the Nigerian email scam that continues to plague the online community.  In the most common versions of this scam circulating on the Internet today, you are promised great sums of money if you assist a Nigerian or someone elsewhere in his effort to transfer money out of his country.  While we refer to this type of scam as the Nigerian Email Scam, as indicated in the email below, not all versions of this scam have a connection to Nigeria as indicated in the email copied below.

Common variations of the scam include the movement of embezzled funds by corrupt officials, a dying man who wants to make charitable gifts, a minor bank official trying to move the money of deceased foreigners out of his bank without the government taking it or, as in this case, abandoned funds.  However, as illustrated by the email copied below, the Nigerian Email Scam often has nothing to do with Nigeria, but merely is a scam where you are promised a large amount of free money based on a ridiculous premise.

In most variations of this scam, although you are told initially that you do not need to contribute anything financially to the endeavor, you soon learn that it is necessary for you to contribute increasingly large amounts of money for various reasons, such as fees, bribes, insurance or taxes before you can get anything.  Of course, the victim ends up paying money to the scammer, but never receives anything in return.

Here is a copy of the email presently circulating.  I have deleted the email address used to send the email and the email address of the recipient. While the email purports to be sent from U.S. Postal Service, the email address of the sender does not have anything to do with the US Postal Service and is most likely the email address of someone whose email address was hacked and made a part of a botnet to send out these scam emails.