That Old Lawyer Scammer Ploy

They will always be the lowest of the low. They suck the life out of any room they step into, which is a rarity, since they spend 99 percent of their lives in a basement. They infest our blogs with comments that prove they're not reading what you wrote. They send us endless get rich quick scheme emails. I speak of course of that vile subspecies of human otherwise known as homo sapiens spammeritis annoyingus. The internet scammer.

The following made its way into my email recently, from someone claiming to be a lawyer.

Dear Friend,

I am a lawyer by profession here in my country Togo--Lome west Africa, one of my clients from your country used to work with a shell development company here in the republic of TOGO Africa. My client, his wife and their only daughter were involved in an auto crash here in my country. I decided to contact you so that the $10.5M Dollars he left behind in a bank here will be transferred to your bank account immediately.

Best regards,

Barrister Johnson Luther Chamber.

We've seen versions of this before. The random email ending up in junk folders, sent to hundreds of thousands of people with the exact same story. This time the lawyer (note: they're not a real lawyer) tells us a story about his client, the wife, and their daughter in Togo dying in a car crash. Oh, and by the way, there's 10.5 million dollars in cash in a bank account waiting for me if I just answer this email.

Yeah, right.

Because if this was real, and it's not, then no self respecting lawyer would be going out of their way to hand off the money to a complete stranger. No, they'd be too busy siphoning that money into their own accounts, because let's face it, most lawyers cannot be trusted. 

So it's not real, but it has the tell-tales of a classic scam. The sad story of the death of a family in a car crash. The Third World setting. The inexplicably large amount of money for someone from a Third World country.

But these are never real. What's real is the convenient "administrative fee" that some poor schmuck who reads the email and actually believes it goes and pays. A few thousand dollars. Followed by the "lawyer" ghosting him and moving on to send another scam email to hundreds of thousands of people.

Nice try, you sod. But I know better. And I know not to trust anything coming from someone like you.

Since you started this with the story of a car crash, may I recommend the following? Get in your car. Drive and park on a freight railroad track. Take some sleeping pills. And fall asleep. Let nature take its course.