I got a text message yesterday that announced: “Congratulations! Your no. has won you 2,000,000 pounds in the freelotto.com mobile promo. For claims send ref uk9209 email: freelottery7@aol.co.uk Tel +4474401248.” Woo-hoo! I’m a millionaire!
Not.
Now call my cynical (people do all the time) but I don’t think this text message was genuine. I’m pretty sure the way lotteries work is by selling lots of tickets to raise revenue, not just giving money away for free. And a quick Google of “freelottery7” has confirmed I’m right.
According to a website called lottery.merseyworld.com: “If you are foolish enough to have started up a phone or e-mail conversation with the scammers, they will inevitably try to get a “claim fee” from you to process the lottery win. Let me see – you’ve “won” a lottery you never entered in the first place and now you’re expected to pay possibly thousands of pounds to someone you’ve never heard of to get hold of “winnings” that they provide no proof whatsoever even exists ?! If you haven’t twigged it’s a scam at this point, you’re quite a naive person to say the least.”
Many naive people do exist because otherwise the scammers wouldn’t bother sending text messages all around the world. Nigerian scams alone have extracted more than $10billion from gullible pockets. Why do people fall for them? Here’s just one wretched story:
“I was contacted by an individual in Abidjan, Cote D Ivoire regarding a bank draft for $400,000.00USD to be delivered to me in the US (Miami, FL). According the attorney in Abidjan, I must send a service fee $200.00USD, plus insurance for the draft of $1,000USD. The draft was seized by the money-laundering squad of Abidjan and now I had to send $4,000USD to retrieve the draft. The draft was retrieved and then sent to a bank in Spain. I was advised of the wire transfer fee $5120.00USD. After that fee was paid, I was advised that the Spanish government requested $6,400USD for document stamps and government taxes. After this was paid $11,000USD was requested from the Spanish government again. At that time my friends and I started investigating and discovered that this was a Nigerian Fraud. I sent a copy of the bank draft to the bank in Abidjan and they advised me that this draft is fraud. I am devastated!”
Now, Husband and I have fallen for the occasional scam in our lives, like the German tourists we befriended in Malaysia who claimed to have been robbed and got Husband to accompany them as an interpreter to the police station (where he started spotting holes in their story). But at least they bought us dinner afterwards as a thank you.
These days, we like to think we are older and wiser.
I do enjoy a reading good scam story though. Like the New York guy who’d been going around dressed as his mother for six years, so he could collect on her social security cheques, and even launch some legal actions in her name. He got away with it by changing details on his mother’s death certificate when she was buried, then dressing up in her clothes and even carrying around her oxygen tank. Now there’s dedication for you.
Or the American weatherman who was drugged and swindled out of more than $40,000 by Eastern European bar girls in Miami, then got fired from his job. The women approached him in a bar and convinced him to do shots with them. Then they took him to their friend’s art shop.
‘I remember standing up … signing something, vaguely,” he recalled. “Next thing I know, I’m in a cab with a big painting [of a woman’s head]. Then I woke up, I had red wine on my shirt and I’m thinking – something happened, but what?’
You were an idiot, that’s what.
But it didn’t stop him going out with them a second time and losing even more cash. He took American Express to court and got his money back, but lost his job after telling his story to Playboy last year. The Playboy interview presented him as a boozehound who followed the women because he was looking to ‘get laid’. He also boasted that one of his favourite pastimes was to ‘watch football naked with my lady and a bottle of wine’.
Yep, total idiot. I feel more sorry for American Express than him.
Actually, I almost got scammed twice yesterday. In the afternoon, I received a letter from Tony Abbott. It said:
“Australia is a great country, which should have a great future. Unfortunately we have a bad government, which is lurching from crisis to crisis unable to give the strong leadership our country desperately needs. ”
Tony then promised to abolish the carbon tax “which will damage our national economy, destroy jobs, diminish superannuation returns and retirement funds and increase the price of everything.”
But he needed a donation from me “within your means, to the Liberal Party to boost our campaign funds”.
Geez, I wonder how many poor suckers he’ll dupe with that one. Bloody scam artists.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN SCAMMED?
housegoeshome 
Not really. Although in New Orleans I was swindled out of $1 by a kid on the street who bet me that he could tell me where I got my shoes. “Anywhere in the world mister, I bet you I can tell you where you got those shoes. One dollar, c’mon man, whaddya say?”. I knew it was a scam but the $1 would be worth it for the entertainment. Sure kid, tell me. “You got ’em on your feet.”
You got off easy in New Orleans if they only fleeced a dollar off you. Only place I’ve ever stayed where they give you a list of scams to watch out for when you check in to your hotel.
This post is gold. Especially the last bit 😉
very funny. Ive had 2 phone calls this morning from elderly customers wanting to now if they had one lotto, cause they got a message on their phone last night with a similar message as yours
Hope you set them straight, Steve.
Only $2,000,000?! Mr Iqbar from Malaysia sent me an e-mail just last week telling me that I had $48,000,000 waiting for me because his deceased client had the same last name as mine! I sent him a reply that I didn’t know there were any other Schlimpefelbergersteins in the world but I haven’t heard back from him! 😦
I also have a customer who wants to buy 3 cars worth $91,000 on the back of the cheque she was supposed to recieve
Aaaargh…hit the wrong button!
….from her Nigerian land purchase with $1.9 million of oil rights! Sad but true…she even sold her old car to pay the last $4,000 installment of her $20,000 purchase! She would not accept that this was a scam and had convinced her whole family that it was for real, hence the 3 new cars! Her father finally rang me last week to tell me not to order any cars because she had been scammed..
I cashed a cheque for a woman in the bar I was working in London back in the ’70s. She offered to give me a “little Porsche” that her dead husband had left (she said he was the Lord Mayor’s chauffeur!) if I could help her out…it cost me a week’s wages in the end and I never saw her, or the Porsche again! Oh, to be 19 and know what I know now…
Ouch, she knew the right carrot to dangle at a 19-year-old – a Porsche! And as for the woman who ordered the three cars … there are no words.