“My esteemed colleague, it is with much reverence that I am humbly, yet secretly,
contacting you to tell you of great fortune that has come my way. My most honorable
relative has kindly left me, in his will, eighty gold bars. Unfortunately, due to
circumstances, I have to regretfully sell on the gold to a trusted overseas beneficiary…” and so on. You’ve maybe received a variant of such an email, called “the Nigerian 419 advance fee email scam” — 419 being a Nigerian Criminal Code related to fraud.
I am a big fan of replying to all such emails. I find it enjoyable when I can make them call a number. I usually give them a police department number. If everyone replied then they would stop (they'd need a scam filter as well to detect real replies). I get 2-3 of these to my junk email address, it is not a big effort to at least send them a blank email. If you add content, you'll most probably get a response.
One more thing: if they ask you to login to a page to pay, the page is usually a fake page. So you can report it to google via http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/.
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Scam Detector Can't Work Magic but It Can Make You Smarter
Posted by: Patrick Nelson July 20, 2012 05:00 AM“My esteemed colleague, it is with much reverence that I am humbly, yet secretly,
contacting you to tell you of great fortune that has come my way. My most honorable
relative has kindly left me, in his will, eighty gold bars. Unfortunately, due to
circumstances, I have to regretfully sell on the gold to a trusted overseas beneficiary…” and so on. You’ve maybe received a variant of such an email, called “the Nigerian 419 advance fee email scam” — 419 being a Nigerian Criminal Code related to fraud.
One more thing: if they ask you to login to a page to pay, the page is usually a fake page. So you can report it to google via http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/.