Curse Of The Walking Scammers

Some links before getting started today. Norma had posts on Father's Day and a book cover. Eve had poetry. Maria wrote about a certain current event. And Lynn wrote about Mabel.

Will they ever give up? Of course not. The scammers and spammers of the world are a relentless lot, ever hoping to get people to believe them in endless emails and attempted spam comments. Sometimes they get creative and find ways around spam filters- such as copying and pasting a remark by the original blogger and adding on their spam link. Scammers have their own creative tendencies- the recent rabbi scammer trick was a new one to me- but by the large part tend to stick to variations on a script. Such as the case below, which ended up in my junk email.

Dear Friend,

Please forgive me because I'm not internet savvy. My name is Mrs. Bernice Hassan, I am a widow to a late oil & Gas and merchant, and now I'm diagnosed with cancer , The doctors said I have three months to live.

When my husband was alive he deposited the sum of $25 million dollars.(twenty-five million dollars) with a finance company /safety in Europe,currently this money is still with the security company.

Having known my condition i decided to donate this fund to charity,i took this decision because i have no child who will inherit this fund hence the reason of taking this bold decision.

I want you to help me distribute this fund to charity organization in your country.

Please reply me if you can help me distribute my funds and I am willing to give you 20% for your time and effort.

Email me at my email address.  As soon i i get your reply i will give you more details, please also know that any delay in reply will give me more room in sourcing for another individual for the same purpose.

Hoping to hear from you soon.

Yours faithfully,

Mrs. Bernice Hassan

Sigh. That's swell, Bernice. You say you're not internet savvy, and yet you've emailed this exact same message to millions of other email accounts despite the fact that we don't want to hear from this week's resident scammer. You also trot out Ye Olde Scammer Ploy- the dead husband who happened to be an oil and gas merchant- though you wrote it as oil and Gas and merchant.... are you not paying attention to grammar? Of course not, you're trying to scam me. Well, nice try, Bernice.

You want me to believe you're dying of cancer. Sure, right, uh huh. And if I believe that, you expect me to believe there's twenty five million in cash you want donated to charity. Wow, your totally non existent hubby has been productive until he kicked the non existent bucket. By the way, you didn't even use the usual sob story about how he died (if we were talking about a former general, the sob story would have involved bullets from those vicious and heartless rebels). And me, being a complete stranger, can get twenty percent if I help you distribute it. Oh, sure, I believe you, anything you say, uh huh... and if you believe that, I've got ocean front property in Idaho you might be interested in.

There's no twenty five million, Bernice. Just as there's no Bernice. You're a front for whatever Nigerian scam artist- or whatever other part of African scammers are plying their trade from this week.

Bye bye, Bernice, or to be more precise whoever you really are. Scammers like you serve no purpose in the world. It's too bad Ebola doesn't do requests, because you could use a good dose of that particular virus.