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The good all scams: new countries, same tricks

20
Sep
2011

This blog post could have been titled also as “A trip from Nigeria to Libya”. Perhaps one of the best-known email scams is the Nigerian letter scam and its many variants. The http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/es/wp-admin/post-new.phpinitial email tries to convince recipients that there are several million dollars which cannot legally leave Nigeria unless transferred to a foreign account. The fraudsters offer a commission to the recipient of the email for helping them get the money out of the country, but ask for an advanced fee from the intended victim (under a myriad pretexts depending on the particular variation of the scam). However, the whole operation is a fraud, and you will lose any money you pay.

These kind of scams are among the first ones in the Internet era, dating back to the 80′s (yeah, that’s a long time, where many people haven’t heard yet about the Internet.) And they work, they will be always there as long as there are people falling in these old school tricks. The reason to use Nigeria was because at that moment there was a big political mess there. Nowadays the situation is better, with their economy being one of the fastest growing in the world. It doesn’t matter, as people doesn’t know that unless it appears in the news… and that’s what some cybercriminals are thinking, as there are some other countries that lately have appeared in the media. As in the case of Libya. So they just have changed the country, added a link to the Wikipedia about a Libyan General that has dead recently and you have yet another scam. This is the message that is circulating now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Fatah_Younis
Pls help me safegaurd this
$42M USD currently loged in a security company in SPAIN by my late father Abdul Fatah Younis, who was arrested and killed by rebel force (NFSL). I will give you more details upon ur acceptance.
Ahmmad Younis
Libya

You have to agree that 42 million dollars is an important amount of money, would you answer this message? ;)

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