The Old International Monetary Fund Scam

They are a vile lot, to say the least. They are the sort of scum who pass their time sending random emails with spam and scams to hundreds of thousands of random email addresses. They post spam comments on blogs that have nothing to do with the post, and show that they never bothered to read the post. They are otherwise known as homo sapiens spammeritis annoyingus, aka the internet scammer and spammer. And they never learn. Despite how much we might ridicule them for their stupidity. The following came through to my email recently.

Dear email owner,

Your email address was chosen at random to receive a Compensation Fund of ATM Visa Card worth $4.5Million dollars. Please we want to confirm if your email address is valid, contact our information dept {adboqm@att.net} to confirm your email address is valid and also for further information on how you can receive your Compensation Fund.

Thanks,
Mrs. Kristalina Georgieva
International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Me again. I've seen this crap before. So have you. It's an endless nuisance. This one employs the old International Monetary Fund scam. They claim to be with the IMF (they're not). They employ the standard bait of millions of dollars for the poor sucker dumb enough to believe this. They make the usual point of using both the $ symbol and the word dollars after the figure, 4.5 million. 

Because of course, that's what the IMF is going to do. Randomly choose people to hand money out to. Not.

No, that's not how they operate. But how this moron operates is dangling in a dummy with irresistible bait, getting them to pay an 'administrative fee' of a few thousand dollars (preferably in gift cards or your bank account password), and then disappearing like a ghost, forever, leaving the dummy scratching their heads and wondering where it all went wrong. 'Maybe he'll call back,' they assure themselves.

Nice try. Really, old sport, but no, I'm not dumb. Go try it on one of the handful of rubes dumb enough to believe you on that list of half a million random emails you sent this to.

Or do yourself a favour. Go find this guy in Middle Earth. The big greedy one.

And slap him upside the snout. Just to see what happens.

Trust me, what could possibly go wrong?