Samuel's Blog

Spammers…some are following the Australian Wheat Board

March 26th, 2006 at 07:31am

As regular readers would be more than well aware by now, I read some of my spam when I feel like a laugh.

Take a look at this email which, on the surface at least, is a simple nigerian scam.

From: isa_frank23@yahoo.co.in
Subject: call me asap
Phone: +234-802-554-9993

pls reply to this box-isa_frank34@yahoo.co.in

Hello My Friend,

I am the chairman of the contract award committee of the National Petroleum Corporation here in Nigerian, for security reasons, I may not wish to disclose how I got your email address for now.

After due deliberation with my partner, I decided to forward to you this business proposal, we want you to assist us receive the sum of Twenty eight million, six hundred thousand united state bills(us28.6m) into your account. This fund resulted from an over-invoiced contract awarded by us under the budget allocation to my ministry and the bill was approved for payment by the concerned ministries. The contract was executed, commissioned and the contractor was paid his actual cost of the contract. Now, we are left with the balance of us28.6m as the over invoiced amount, which we have deliberately over estimated for our own use. Please note that the law forbids civil servants to operate or own foreign accounts hence this contact, we have agreed to share the money in the following percentages: 30 for you, 60 for us 10 for tax as may be required by your government.

Note that this transaction is very much free from all sorts of risk hence the business was carefully planned before it was successfully executed and we the officials involved in the deal have put many years in service to our ministry. We have been exercising patience for this privilege for so long not until the presidential announcement last week, that all foreign contractors owed be paid forthwith, this will enable the presidency reconcile our debt ratio with the outside world and to most of us, this is a lifetime blessing we cannot afford to miss. Upon indication of your interest to fully co-operate with us, a payment application/information form will be sent to you via email for completion.

Be informed also that the above mentioned formV when properly completed by you and return via email, will enable us seek/secure approval of the fund from the concerned government quarters/ministries within 1-2 banking days.

As soon as we confirm receipt of this money in your nominated bank account, my partner and I will come over to your country to arrange for our own share and possibly invest part of this money in your country.

Let honesty and trust be our watchword throughout this transaction. I shall furnish you with some details about myself. Your prompt reply will be highly appreciated.

Best regards.

Adams I.S.A

Alright, got that? Did you notice anything odd about it? Here is the bit that caught my attention.

This fund resulted from an over-invoiced contract awarded by us under the budget allocation to my ministry and the bill was approved for payment by the concerned ministries. The contract was executed, commissioned and the contractor was paid his actual cost of the contract. Now, we are left with the balance of us28.6m as the over invoiced amount, which we have deliberately over estimated for our own use.

It is quite interesting that they go on to say

Note that this transaction is very much free from all sorts of risk

Errr, we have a national monopolistic wheat board and a related government being dragged through the mud with the real possibility of being prosecuted for this exact behaviour. They might not have kept the excess money for themselves, but they did play a part in the fiasco, the extent of which shall be decided by the Cole Inquiry.

In releated news, the spammers have been having trouble with their latest spambots not parsing silly sender names correctly, and instead leaving “[%from_name%]” as the sender’s name. Those that are sending names correctly are continuing to make up silly names, with an exceptional example coming in last night…for that very reason I say hello to a certain “Spoilers U. Poliomyelitis” who was kind enough to send me useless information about his online pharmacy, and the following bit of information

When the cat’s away the mice will play.
Much laughter, a little wit.
Children and fools tell the truth.

I have too much fun with my spam sometimes, which incidentally is currently on 1408 emails for the last 30 days…and Gmail filtered them all!

Samuel

Entry Filed under: Bizarreness

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