The United States Department of State (Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affair) has issued a very useful, informative and, more importantly, READABLE document online about the most common type of international fraud
Here’s an excerpt:
… AFF criminals include university-educated professionals who are the best in the world for nonviolent spectacular crimes. AFF letters first surfaced in the mid-1980s around the time of the collapse of world oil prices, which is Nigeria’s main foreign exchange earner. Some Nigerians turned to crime in order to survive. Fraudulent schemes such as AFF succeeded in Nigeria, because Nigerian criminals took advantage of the fact that Nigerians speak English, the international language of business, and the country’s vast oil wealth and natural gas reserves—ranked 13th in the world—offer lucrative business opportunities that attract many foreign companies and individuals.
AFF confidence schemes are limited only by imagination, however, they usually fall into the following categories:
• Transfer of Funds From Over-Invoiced Contracts
• Contract Fraud (C.O.D. of Goods and Services)
• Conversion of Hard Currency (Black-Money)
• Sale of Crude Oil at Below Market Prices
• Purchase of Real Estate
• Disbursement of Money from Wills (Benefactor of a Will)
• Threat Scams or Extortion
• Clearinghouse
Each of these business schemes will be discussed in detail in the section entitled AFF Schemes: Themes and Variations.
According to the Metropolitan Police Company Fraud Department in London, some 3,000 AFF letters a week are mailed or faxed worldwide; primarily from Nigeria.
The United States and Great Britain are the recipients of over 50 percent of this material.
Get the document in PDF format from : http://www.state.gov/www/regions/africa/naffpub.pdf
As I said, worth reading. Send a copy to all your relatives today – especially those ’silver surfer’ types – they are the prime target of many of these scams.
When I get spam from a charity asking specifically for donations I visit the website just to see what kind of organization would use spam to solicit contributions. In most cases it’s a scam. Bona fide charities would NEVER spam you.
So this morning I received the following email
Stop! Help us, we are in need!
We are a non-governmental and non-profit association “Stop ajutane suntem in nevoie”. Taking into account that Romania has been confronted with numerous major problems such as floods, poor children and pensioneers who cannot afford expensive medicines. We want your support to build new dwellings for those who lost them because of the disasters and new homes for the children of the streets where they can be fed and taken good care of.
If you want to help us please visit our website by clicking www.stopandhelpus.org.
Copyright © 2007 Stop ajutane suntem in nevoie
www.stopandhelpus.org All Rights Reserved .
The website www.stopandhelpus.org is a cheesy template site with lots of links and badly written copy. Seems to be run out of Romania which always rings alarm bells.
I checked the domain name and, as I suspected, the domain name was registered on 19th June 2007 (Yesterday!) [ding ding]
The domain registrar (the person who owns the domain name) is hidden by a proxy [ding ding ding]
On a side note, these privacy proxies are all very well, but they are used by scammers to slow down investigations of scam websites. I think I’ll send a copy of this to contact@myprivateregistration.com and see if they do anything.
Anyway, if you hadnt gathered by now, at best ’stopandhelpus’ is a naive, slightly crummy new charity, staffed by good hearted but shady people or (as I think) they are an out and out scam.
W hatever you do, do not send any money to these scammers. I just hope that this post gets ‘out there’ soon enough so that anyone who searches for STOPANDHELPUS will find this page first.
contact@myprivateregistration.com
Here’s a recent scam job offer I received, one of many. Better written than usual, but the same tagline – ‘Payment Processing‘ (aka ‘Transaction Processing Agent‘ etc). This scam involves sending the victim a large check, then asking him to deduct a commission (usually 5-15%) and then to send the rest on to a third party, usually by money order, or our good friends at Western ‘The Scammers Best Friend’ Union.
The hit comes when the original check bounces. This may take up to three weeks, by which time many more checks may have been ‘processed’.
Just because your bank accepts a check, doesnt mean it’s good – it just means that until it has cleared, it’s good.
And it’s no use crying to the bank – it’s YOUR money that you’re sending, not theirs and if that means you own the bank that money – well, you owe the bank that money.
There’s also another nasty aspect to this scam – the victim may (unknowingly) be taking part in money laundering activities to terrorist organizations, crime syndicates etc. and the cops may want to know why you’re helping them!
From: Mr. Luan Newborn
(Public Relations Officer)
Dear Friend,
I would like to get right to it and let you know that this program is only for serious-minded marketers who believe in taking action and making things happen…
But Please: Understand that most marketers out there jump-around from one thing to the next and treat this business as a game. Most out there are not serious and have no “real” intention of ever really making any kind of difference in their lives.
Most people also believe they can “make it” in this business “on their own” and it seems those people continue to fail over-and-over again. Since we cannot possibly work directly with every single person out there, this program is “limited” and only for serious minded individuals in the globe.