The South African Millionaire Scam

While I get no end of spam in my blog spam folders, fortunately almost all of them automatically get caught and dumped into the purgatory otherwise known as the spam folder. It has been awhile since the despicable vermin that are internet scammers sent along any junk email trying to get me to believe that they are the secretary/ wife/ daughter/ concubine/ bookie of the late and dear general/ dictator/ reverend/ feared overlord/ cult leader what's-his-face. Until a few days ago when this gem turned up in my junk email folder.

Greetings,

I am Alan Reid, personal assistant to late Mr. Abe Krok, a South African gambling tycoon and one of the country's richest men in South African.

I will like you to help me in receiving fund $19.300 million into your Bank Account please Contact me for more details

Thank you very much.

Regards,

Alan Reid.

Where do we begin? Well, for starters, our totally lying liar times infinity plus one got his name misspelled in his email address- instead of Alan Reid, it was Alad Rein. And instead of being based out of South Africa as such a real person would be, his country's internet country code marks him as being from Malaysia. Which of course is fertile ground for the accursed internet scammers.

There are of course the other tell-tales. Misspellings, capitalized words that don't need capitalization, and punctuation issues are always hallmarks of the internet scammers. The fact that our hapless twit writes it as "...personal assistant to late Mr. Abe Krok" instead of "personal assistant to the late Mr. Abe Krok" speaks volumes. Hey, it might be just one small word, but the actual assistant to an actual millionaire would have the education to write it properly. And our worthless pile of crap... oh, I mean, Mr. Reid... no, wait, I got it right the first time. Anyway, the resident scammer gets the rest of that sentence wrong too- "a South African gambling tycoon and one of the country's richest men in South African". In South African? Drop the n at the end of Africa, moron. In fact, if you were real, which you are not, you'd simply end that sentence at richest men.

As it turns out there was a South African millionaire by that name who died a couple of years back. Apparently he and his brother made a great deal of money on skin lightening products, football clubs, and gambling interests (and getting themselves into legal troubles of their own). And as it turns out, the Alan Reid scammer (or whatever his real name is) has been circulating a variation on the above message since the old bastard kicked the bucket.

One wonders how the real Abe Krok would feel about his name being misused by scammers after his death. Let's face it, real millionaires don't have their real personal assistants email countless people trying to convince them this too good to be true scam is true. Real personal assistants, on the other hand, might spend some of their time figuring out ways to siphon off the boss's fortune, but that's a different story. And our resident scammer wants me to believe there's 19.3 million dollars out there just for me. 

Uh huh, sure. Right. Whatever.

Nice try, dimwit, but most of us aren't blithering idiots dumb enough to buy into your con. You'll just have to hope that someone in the thousands upon thousands of other people you've sent this email to might be. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this particular warning. I highly recommend you take it seriously, because you wouldn't like Fluffy when he's angry.