« 419 Plea: Help Me Commit Fraud | Main | Express Payment »

July 30, 2010

Instead of the overly long tales of woe about how someone with my same last name died intestate with boatloads of cash hidden in a foreign bank, or the hyper-detailed lottery winning notifications complete with batch numbers, the following 419 scam email message is a testament to the value of brevity:

From Charles Bean
Deputy Governor
Financial Monitoring
Bank of England [B.O.E]

This is to officially inform you that your long awaited overdue Inheritance fund valued at $8m Eight Million United State Dollars only has been approved for immediate payment to you.

For the Purpose of Verification and authentication.

You are advised to Contact me on [removed]@live.com

Thanks,

Charles Bean.

There will be plenty of inexperienced recipients of this missive who will not realize that a live.com email address is from a free account, rather than an official Bank of England email address. I think this short and simple approach may be more effective in getting suckers on the hook than the taller tales told by this guy's fellow scammers.