Friday, July 11, 2008

Enough of those stupid Nigeria 419 e-mails!

Going through my personal e-mail this morning, I found one of those cute West African scam letters -- you know, the kind where there are millions of "unclaimed" dollars and they're willing to cut you in on 30% or more of the take if you only take certain steps to "co-operate."

I've had several of these as of late. Usually, I've just deleted them. But the tone of this one -- allegedly from Burkina Faso -- made me reach the breaking point. So I decided to forward it to PhoneBusters, a project here in Canada run by a number of police agencies including the Mounties.

If you get something like that here in Canada, make sure to mark it as spam (if your e-mail filter already didn't) then forward it to wafl [at] phonebusters.com -- they're always looking for new variants on the scam and need all the help they can get; or alternately call the Mounties. In the States, report it to the Secret Service. Elsewhere report it to the relevant national authorities.

I for one am sick and tired of these e-mails and letters. ISPs and general e-mail providers should be doing more to stop them. I don't need your money that doesn't exist, I don't need any of your male enhancement pills and I certainly don't need to refinance at 600% interest per week. Now that we're clear on that, regular blogging resumes ...

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Check out 419eater.com, the good folks there have been protecting the innocent from these scammers for many years now.