THIS BLOG IS TO ENLIGHTEN VICTIMS OR WOULD BE VICTIMS ON HOW TO IDENTIFY INTERNET FRAUD (FRAUDULENT EMAILS, PHONE CALLS AND FAX)
Why the so much alert on fraud with some countries like Nigeria designating a Commission solely to prosecute perpetrators? What is fraud doing to our everyday life? The good, the bad and the ugly face of the internet – is fraud the ugly face of the internet?
Fraud has made some happy, some miserable and frustrated and others paupers.
Everybody is either hurt pocket-wise or reputation-wise. For Nigeria, we are losing in both folds as our reputation is being dragged in the mud and money is also fraudulently taken from Nigerians like their foreign counterparts.
Foreigners should be aware they are not the only once paying heavily for this dubious act which some have taken as fulltime job. We are ready to contribute our knowledge and time to the fight against this menace by revealing their modus operandi.
A fraud is an intentional act by one or more individuals to obtain an unjust or illegal advantage. Fraud may be perpetrated by an individual, or group of individuals in collusion with people internal to a target which may be an individual or a business concern.
There are various ways in which fraud is perpetrated. We are categorizing them according to the medium through which they are perpetrated.
They are:
Internet fraud
Text message fraud
Face to face fraud
Facsimile fraud
This list is not exhaustive of the form of fraud.
Our emphasis here is on frauds perpetrated through the internet. Internet fraud has become a cankerworm ravaging and destroying countries and their reputation.
There are diverse ways through which fraud are perpetrated on the internet. Those ways are like bait for preys. Some preys are greedy and as a result of that, money is taken away from them. For some other preys, they were not greedy but just being nice, unfortunately to the wrong people.
Let us start by listing the formats internet fraud takes.
The lottery format
The representative format
The “come marry” format
The loan agent format
Etc
We are going to discuss each of these formats one after the other.
THE LOTTERY FRAUD FORMAT
In a world where manna no longer fall from the sky like in the days of the Israelites in the wilderness as in the Holy Bible, I do not know why some expect money to just come raining from the sky in the guise of winning from a lottery you never purchased its ticket, sometimes never even heard of the lottery before and you do not know the company.
Imagine this, a man just walks up to you and tells you that you are a lucky man. Some people might bother to ask why the man described them as lucky then he goes straight to the point letting the cat of the bag saying that among over five million email addresses that were chosen in a recently concluded lottery draw; your email address was one of the few that were picked to be paid a whooping sum of money in cash or cheque whichever you preferred.
It surprises me that people hear such bogus stories and fall head over toes and start being expectant, planning how he or she is going to spend the money. I want to ask a question, do you think the richest men and companies in the world are interested in sharing money around like those funny lottery winning notification that you receive in your mail boxes? Do you think there is anybody in this world that wants his next door neighbour to be as rich as he is even when they wish you well? In similar vein, the lottery companies all over the World are not interested in just making people rich rather like it is a common saying in Economics that in the process of trying to pursue your self interest unknown to you, you are helping others achieve their own interest. That is what lottery companies are doing. They make minority rich and make majority poor.
Being fooled by lottery scam starts with fraudsters getting email address from message boards, websites archives, etc which are extracted from messages through the help of an email extractor. Thereafter a spurious lottery winning notification is composed with logos and names of companies like Mercedes Bens, BMW, Honda, Coca cola, Microsoft, Yahoo, National Lottery, U.k., Australia Lottery, Wales Lottery, etc attached to the notification to make it look real to the recipients and appellations like doctor, professor, pastor etc attached to the names of those that they claim signed the notification mail. Please don’t be carried away with big names, not even those with religious titles. Sometimes a picture of the individual that they claimed to have signed the notification is attached to it. These are all targeted at making the notification looks very real to the recipients.
It is important to let you know that these pictures are gotten through search engines like Google, Msn, etc.
If you research further on these pictures, you will find out that the names in the notification is not the actual name of the person in the picture and he or she is not even aware that his or her picture is being used for such.
These are samples of spurious lottery winning notification sent around by fraudsters. It may not be the exact one you have received or may receive but they are slightly different from each other.
WINNING NOTIFICATION.
"YAHOO LOTTERY"
Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Subject: YAHOO AWARD PROMO!!!!!!
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 17:56:04 -0600
Yahoo!mail Lottery Promotion
Support Center
Bevan House
51 Bevan Avenue
Conwy LL28 5AF
United Kingdom
FROM: THE DESK OF THE PROMOTION MANAGER
INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONS/PRICE AWARD DEPARTMENT.
REF NO: BTL/4410X1/02
BATCH NO: 11/05/0104
RE: AWARD WINNING NOTIFICATION/ FINAL NOTICE
Yahoo Email Lottery Promotion wishes to inform you the results of the E-mail address ballot lottery international program by Yahoo world wide held on Saturday 11th March, 2006. Your email address was attached to ticket number 71210900545-319, with serial number 0382/05 drew with lucky numbers 11-43-42-17-50-43, and consequently you Won the lottery in the (A) category. All participants were selected through a computer ballot system drawn from Microsoft users from company and individual email addresses of all kinds of domain.
You have therefore been approved a lump sum of ONE MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED GREAT BRITAIN POUNDS.
Be adviced to keep your winning information confidential until your claims has been processed and your money remitted to you. This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program, For the release of your prize money, kindly contact your prize release agent:
================================================== =========
Agent: Mr. Kenneth Taylor
Email: claimsagent@post.com
Fax: +447075757030
================================================== =========
You are to provide the information below to your funds release agent to process your winnings.
Name:
Address:
Occupation:
Nationality:
Age:
Tel:
Fax:
Our agent will immediately commence the process to facilitate the release of your funds to you as soon as you contact him. Also remember to quote your lucky number for confirmation on your winning in every correspondence with your funds release agent.
All winning must be claimed not later than 31st of March, 2006. After this date all unclaimed funds will be returned to Yahoo Email Lottery Treasury as unclaimed. Furthermore, should there be any Change of your address; do inform your claims agent as soon as possible.
Congratulations!! Again from all our staffs and thank you for being part of our promotional lottery program.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Paul Gray
Zonal Coordinator
(Promotions Manager)
=============================================================
3B OLYMPIC WAY, SEXTONS BUSINESS PARK,
AINTREE, LIVERPOOL, L30 1RD.
WINNING NOTICE FOR CATEGORY "A" WINNER
BONUS LOTTERY PROMOTION PRIZE AWARDS WINNING NOTIFICATION
Our Dear Winner,
We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded lottery draws of UNITED KINGDOM NATIONAL LOTTERY international Lottery programs. The online cyber lotto draws was conducted from an exclusive list of 21,000 e-mail addresses of individual and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet, no tickets were sold. After this automated computer ballot, your e-mail address emerged as one of two winners in the category "A" with the following winning information:
REF No: UKNL-L/200-26937
BATCH No: 2005MJL-01
TICKET No: 20511465463-7644
SERIAL No: S/N-00168
LUCKY No: 887-13-865-37-10-83
You as well as the other winner are therefore to receive a cash prize of £500,000.00. Pounds (Five hundred thousand pounds only) each from the total payout.
Your prize award has been insured with your e-mail address and will be transferred to you upon meeting our requirements, statutory obligations, verifications, validations and satisfactory report. To begin the claims processing of your prize winnings you are advised to contact our licensed and accredited claims agent for category "A" winners with the information below:
To file your claim, please contact the processing agent;
Mr William A. McGill.
Hopefully this will reach enough people before they make a bad decision!
===============================================================
From: MR FRANK JAWARA AND MRS PATRICIA NKOMO
Euro-Afro-American-Sweepstake Lottery
Headquarters: 1a, Bexon Court Carlton
Nottingham shire Nottingham NG4 1SQ Essex
United Kingdom
Customer Service: 580 NCA 85914
Ref: EAASL/941OYI/04
Batch: 12/25/DC34
TEL+ 44- 703 184 9053
Fax:+44-773-1313-554
CONGRATULATIONS WINNING NOTIFICATION
My Dear
We happily announce to you the draw of the Euro-Afro American Sweepstake Lottery International programs held on the 30th DECEMBER. in Essex United Kingdom. Your e-mail address attached to ticket number: B9564 75604545 188
with! Serial number 97560 drew the winning:06/13/17/23/32/43, which subsequently won you the lottery in the 2nd category. You have therefore
been approved to claim a total sum of US$820,000.00 (Eighty Hundred and Twenty Thousand United States Dollars) in cash credited to file KPC/9080118308/02.This is from a total cash prize of US $1100,000,00 Million
dollars, shared amongst the first One Hundred and thirty (130) lucky winners in this category world-wide.
Please note that your lucky winning number falls within our Afro booklet representative office in United Kingdom as indicated in your play coupon. In view of this, your US$820,000.00 (Eight Hundred and Twenty Thousand United States Dollars)would be released to you by H. S. B. C BANK United Kingdom .
Our United Kingdom agent will immediately commence the process to facilitate the release of your funds as soon as you contact him. All participants were selected randomly from World Wide Web site through computer draws system and extracted from over 10,000,00 companies. This promotion takes place annually.
For security reasons, you are advised to keep your winning information confidential till your claims is processed and your money remitted to you in whatever manner you deem fit to claim your prize.
This is part of our precautionary measure to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program by some unscrupulous elements. Please be warned. To file for your claim, please contact our corresponding agent in
South Africa immediately you read this message for quick and urgent release of your fund, contact information is as follow: -
Name: MR RICHARD BULOYI
Legal Attorneys No 25 Tower bulding carton bellon president town United Kingdom
Tel Line: + 44- 703- 184- 9031
E-mail: richardbuloyi_2007@yahoo.co.uk
E:mail: richardbuloyi2005@yahoo.co.uk
Please be informed that all winning must be claimed on or before 31th JULY 2007. To avoid unnecessary delays and complications, please quote your reference/batch numbers in any correspondences with our designated agents or us. Congratulations once more from all members and staffs of this program that has successfully won this competition. Thank you for being part of our promotional lottery program. As soon as you are in contact with our agent,please keep us informed.
Sincerely,
Mr. FRANK JAWARA AND MRS PATRICIA NKOMO
TEL+ 44- 703 184 9053
Fax:+44-773-1313-554
United Kingdom Zonal Co-coordinator.
Mr. Alexandra Davis
United Kingdom zonal Secretary General.
Thank you for your Co-operation.
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The next thing the fraudster does is either to acquire a domain with a web mail capability to personalize the email address to make it look real or set up a free email account and start sending the messages to the email addresses he gathered earlier.
The biggest source of email accounts in the past was Msn (all because it allows bulk messaging from a 100 email addresses at a time) which requires a credit card for payment. Previously, they use generated credit cards to create the Msn accounts, this they did until Msn tightened up its credit card verification security which has resulted in fraudsters looking for other email accounts that can replace Msn. At the moment domains can be bought with genuine or fraudulent credit cards. But the accounts do not last long because when the credit card information provided is verified and found to be fraudulent, the accounts are closed. As a result of this, in the winning notification mail, you are required to send your reply to another email address which most of the time is a free email account from websites like myway.com, yahoo.com, rediffmail.com, mail.com, etc.
Note that the winning notification message is not sent to only one email address at a time rather they send the messages in bulk (at least ten email addresses at a time) using the bcc box instead of the to box. They make use of the bcc box to the keep the recipient thinking that the mail was actually sent to him or her alone. Stop asking question like if it wasn’t real why was the mail sent to me alone? It wasn’t.
Here the big mistake that sucks money out of your pocket, bank account, or those around you starts from the moment you decide to reply the winning notification mail with the required personal information which include: name, address, age, phone number, ticket number, batch number, etc and at the end of the winning notification mail it is written that you should keep your winning information to yourself to prevent double claimants. Put differently by some, “due to the mix up of some numbers and names, we ask that you keep this award strictly from public notice until your claim has been processed and your money remitted to your account" This is all in the guise to prevent you from telling a third party that can point out that the winning is spurious, a person that can help you look into the mail to see if the words common with scam mails are in it.
If you are the types that follow instructions to the letter, I expect you to obey that advice of secrecy and if you do, by that singular act you would have added your name to the bunch of people fraudsters call “mugu”.
In the mail you are asked to send your reply to an agent that uses a free email account like yahoo, msn, my way, etc to take care of the remaining winning remittance process. Do you bother to ask the question: why will a company use a free email account for such a sensitive undertaking? Why do they transfer the sensitive part of the lottery to an external party? This external party is sometimes presented to their victims as attorney so they can pay attention to them and gets the victims confidence; the said attorneys are some high school dropouts.
As soon as the victims contact the “attorney” or agent with the required information they are fifty percent hopeful that they can have their hands on your money.
The agent or attorney starts asking you how do you want your winning delivered to you? The victim is given the options of courier delivery of the cash or bank transfer.
The option the victim chooses from the above options tells the next step the fraudster would take to have his hand on your money.
Steps under the courier delivery option:
This option is cheaper compared to the bank transfer. The victim is asked to contact their registered and trusted courier service. (The fraudster also controls the courier service company)
As soon as the victim contacts the courier service you are replied with a form that he or she is required to fill. In the form the victim is required to provide contact information that he or she wants the consignment to be delivered to.
Also the cost of the delivery, insurance, packaging, etc is sent to the victim. The cost of the service varies on the number of days it will take before the consignment is delivered to the recipient.
In this courier service option, sometimes the courier services will have websites and spoof email addresses which are tied to free email accounts. When there is a website, sometimes you are required to fill the form online and cost of the service on the website for the victim to decide which number of day’s delivery he or she can afford.
When the victim decides which to go for, he or she is to make payment through Western union or Money gram and send the payment information to the spoof email address on the website.
I can see you have one question on your mind now. Like what about when you state the payment destination?
That is no problem for them at all. Most of the fraudsters have mentors in countries like United Kingdom, Netherlands, United States of America, etc. which are commonly referred to as off shore down here. If the victim sends the payment to say London in the united kingdom simply because the courier service company’s spurious physical location is the United Kingdom; the off shore go to western union or money gram office with an identity and receive the payment. You might bother to know how the offshore gets the identity for that particular name. This is why it is fraud; the name you are given by the courier company is not the name of the company but the name of an individual. That name is the name the off shore gave the perpetrator down here to use anytime there is need for him to receive money on his behalf. This is simply because that is the name on his fake identity. Some of the fraudster gives you the off shore’s name as the name of their secretary.
I think western union and money gram can help in this area; it might not be good for business but it is a way to protect its customers and it is their contribution to the fight against fraud and money laundering.
They should insist that senders should attach the picture of the receiver to the money being sent. This will ensure that the supposed person actually picks the money.
The above suggestion can correct a lot in payment through these media for fraudulent purposes and this will reduce the number of people in the business down here; simply because the fear of economic and financial crimes commission (EFCC) is the beginning of wisdom when it comes to fraud in Nigeria.
Steps on the bank transfer option
If the victim goes for the bank transfer the procedures are kind of straight forward. The spurious bank transfer is facilitated through the help of a website with a popular bank’s name like the Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, CITIBANK etc where an account is opened with the victim’s particulars and the account access information is sent to the victim.
When the victim accesses the account he or she is required to transfer the money his or her personal account and when he tries to transfer the money to his or her personal account the victim meets a brick wall.
The victim will then write to the agent informing him that he or she was not able to transfer the money to his personal account. Here the fraudster is able to open the door to your pocket getting your hard earned cash.
The fraudster will then write back stating the condition with which the victim will be able to transfer the money to his or personal account; the conditions include:
He or she has to pay the cost of opening the account since it is not permanent account. It is opened strictly for this transaction, tax, etc
As soon as the victim remits the money required for the transfer to be possible in relation to the conditions above, the victim is told to go and transfer the money.
The victim will go and try again and still meet the initial brick wall.
Since the victim is still oblivious of the fact that he or she is dealing with a fraudster, the fraudster will come up with another fee the anti-money laundering fee which cost more than the initial payments. If after the victim as paid the anti money laundering fee he or she is still unaware of the shit he or she is in then the “maga” is a perfect one for the business of fraud. The victim is going to continue to pay fee until he or she is sucked dried to the bone. Then you would have just been erased!!!
The above story tells you how lottery fraud is perpetrated and how people give away their hard earn cash.
There are some more things you need to know about lottery scam. They include:
1. You can only win a lottery you bought a ticket for.
2. If you have actually won (that is, you have a winning ticket), you contact the lottery company - they never contact you.
3. it is illegal for a lottery company to charge you a fee to collect your prize - it doesn't matter what they say the fee is for, no bone fide lottery company does that.
4. check the email address it comes from - even if they say they are the National Lottery, UK or some genuine sounding organization, it probably come from a free email provider like yahoo, hotmail, my way, mail, msn, etc. sometimes they spoof the headers to make it appear to come from somewhere else - the way to check the real return address is to click "reply" and see what comes up in the "to" line of the email. An easy way to check if the account is a free email account when you are not familiar with email account simply go to www.dnsstuff.com - scroll down to the last box on the left and you'll see a box marked "free email lookup" - enter the email address there and it will tell you.
5. The winning notification contains a lot of grammatical blunders. Look out for grammatical error because a reputable organization into such business employs a capable hand to write their letters or emails.
6. Also look at the currency in which your winning is stated. If a lottery company is based in South Africa it is not possible for that company to state its winning sum in dollars or pounds sterling.
7. Look up the phone number attached to the winning notification mail. Most of the numbers attached to these winning notification for United Kingdom starts with “701”, “702”, “703” (example: + 44- 703 184 9053) and so on after the country code. The phone numbers in the mail are always mobile phones. The numbers are gotten from- www.uknumbers.com. The website provides a United Kingdom calls divert for free, that is; I can give you a United Kingdom phone number to call me while I am actually not in the United Kingdom and when you call the United Kingdom number my phone with me outside the United Kingdom rings.
There are other websites that also diverts call but for a fee.
8. People into fraud are not actually who they say they are. They can say they are Britons while they are actually Nigerians. Another way to known you are dealing with a fraudster is through phone calls. If you are good with English you can differentiate when a Briton talking from an American, African or Asian. These people have assent. Ears do not lie. Listen you will be able to pick that assent when they are talking.
9. Ask the claims agent for his office phone number which is suppose to be a landline. When you are given try calling to see if it connects at all.
10. You can decode it is a scam when the so called claims agent call you. Easy! the number of the phone from which he is calling is always withheld that is because if you divert a number to your mobile the number does not becomes your number when you call without withholding the number the Nigerian number is what you will see on your phone.
11. Always try to take a look at the website of the company they claimed sent it to verify the claims. If you look up the website and it is under construction or looks like a search engine then you are dealing with a fraudulent email.
There are exceptions to the website look up. Some fraudulent go as far as designing a standard lottery website to make their claims convincing; please do not be deceived. Verification of physical address of the firm is more important.
To be continued...
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