The Nigerian Auto Tycoon Scam

Thousands of years ago, when people were painting images of animals onto cave walls, one wonders if someone asked, "hey, Uthor, can I draw an ad for the sabre-toothed tiger repellant I'm trying to unload?" 

We can always count on them to never get the point: go away and die a horrible death already, you're annoying me. I speak, of course, of the internet scammers and the spammers, who prowl the web looking for suckers to buy into the scam, or try to infest our email or comments with their spam. Have a look at the following, which turned up in my junk email folder under the title "Please Reason With Me."

Dear Sir,

I am the Senate President of Nigeria as you can Google my name online and I am contacting you with official email to confirm the authenticity of this message. I made secret security of Eight Million U.S Dollars US$8M, which I want you to receive urgently on my behalf because I intend to establish auto trading company with it.

The US$8M will not require customs clearance in your country because the security firm is specialize in warehouse to warehouse shipment, this means that you will be communicated immediately the consignment arrive in the security company's warehouse in your country. This can be possibly handled today if you quickly provide the following processing details.

1)  Your complete address

2)  Your full name

3)  Your cell phone number

4)  Attach your valid ID card

On the receipt of the above information, I shall officially authorize the delivery in your favor and foot the delivery charges to have the consignment shipped directly to their warehouse in your country, while you pickup the consignment at ease. Also, I shall detail your responsibility in this transaction because your reward is 20% of the total amount which is very huge and requires your sincere effort/punctuality to actualize success.

Faithfully,

Honorable Sen. Bukola Saraki

President of the Senate of Nigeria

Private email: buksaraki11@gmail.com

Well, where to begin? Probably with the fact that despite a listed email that said one thing, the email address in the original email came from something called supremus.org. That leads to a forum site. Hardly a promising step. Now yes, there is a Bukola Saraki, and yes, he is the president of Nigeria's Senate. And no doubt he probably finds it irritating to have scammers hijacking his name. But no, he's not spending his time writing out scam emails to complete strangers. Whether or not he's at the top of a nefarious Nigerian scammer organization, well, I don't know, I'd have to have better knowledge of the country and the man for that.

The usual tell-tales are there. Wording that feels off, such as "...contacting you with official email" or "I made secret security". As usual, whoever actually writes this does not have a natural sense of the English language and how sentence structure flows. English is the official language in Nigeria, and so if this was actually coming from Bukola, which it's not, you'd expect proper sentencing.

He's dangling that big amount of money- eight million bucks, with promises of a 20% commission for me. Isn't that generous? A complete stranger entrusted with his money? How nice. All so he can start up an auto trading company with it. No, wait, let's use his wording:  "I intend to establish auto trading company with it."

His wording also gets creative as he goes along: "because the security company is specialize in warehouse to warehouse shipment." Shouldn't that be "company specializes"? Is that so hard for you to get? And have you ever heard the phrase "foot the delivery charges"?

He leaves off with that twenty percent commission: "...of the total amount which is very huge and requires your sincere effort/ punctuality to actualize success."

Very huge? Come on, man, you're sounding like Trump. 

And actualize success? I hate to point this out to you, but the only people who phrase anything like that are marketing chimps concealing the fact that they're bluffing their way through a presentation, hoping they'll put their clients to sleep. Them, and scam artists like yourself.

Nice try, scammeritus irritatingus. You'll have to hope that one of the hundreds of thousands of other people you've sent this to takes the bait. All I can say is it's too bad time travel isn't possible. We could retrieve one of those sabre-toothed tigers from twenty thousand years ago and send them after you.