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March 08, 2010

A common ploy among advance-fee scammers is the attempt to rend the recipient's heart because the rich sender now has a terminal illness and wants to make sure his or her booty winds up in good hands — rather than in the hands of his or her greedy and untrustworthy family members. This is a triple scam because the dying person wants the recipient to use the funds to distribute among charities — really assuming that the recipient is supremely greedy, and plans to take the money and run once the sender kicks the bucket. In other words, the scammer is assuming his victims will try to scam the dead scammer. In the process, however, it is the email recipient who will be the only one scammed out of fake processing, storage, transfer, and other fees that ultimately never yield a penny.

The medical trend I've noticed in such 419 scam messages arriving here recently has been an enormous outbreak of esophageal cancer (often with the correct spelling of the fake diagnosis). That's a safe choice, unlike one Nigerian woman who claimed some years ago to be riddled with prostate cancer.