Name Hijacking Scammers From Hell

I mentioned in my previous post about getting another scam email in my junk folders lately. Such was the case with this, which was brief, and it was the name listed more than anything else that made me want to look more into it.

I, Friedrich Mayrhofer Donate $ 1,000,000.00 to You, Email Me

personally for more details.

  this is the second time i am writing you do email me back if
you receive my first mail to you.

Regards.

Friedrich Mayrhofer. It's the sort of name you expect perhaps belonging to someone who's managed to avoid war crimes prosecution for seventy years. Actually, it's not. I checked the name, and it turns out that Mr. Mayrhofer is a Canadian who a year or so back won one of the lotteries here with two family members. Furthermore, there are a number of articles in newspapers when you've checked his name indicating that someone out there has co-opted his name for the purposes of internet scamming. It has nothing at all to do with the man himself.

So of course this is a scammer. While it's short and completely devoid of the usual scammer stories by a widow/ daughter/ secretary/ confessor/ bartender of the late dear husband/ benevolent tyrant/ general/ righteous minister/ drug lord, it originates from the same circle of demented scammers in some third world hellhole. It starts with the email address itself, which upon looking at country codes for internet email turns out to originate in Morocco. That's kind of a long way away from Canada, but in the right part of the world for the vilest of the vile (no, not the Dancing With The Stars production, though they are revolting): internet scammers.

And then there are the usual tell tales of a scammer who's not really working with English as their first language. The poor sentence structure and absence of punctuation where there should be punctuation. The capitalized words, like Donate, Email, Me- none of which should be capitalized. And the offer of a big amount of money to a complete stranger, with the details yet to come. All hallmarks of that wretch of a human being, your typical internet scammer.

And now here they are, dragging a lottery winner's name through the mud.

Do they have some sort of quota? Like "one dumb sucker believing this crap for every five thousand emails we send out?" Whoever they are, all I can say is this: rather than continue with this line of work, why don't you go out and relax? 

Go skydiving. Without a parachute.