Leggo My Lagos!

REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

(URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL) RE: TRANSFER OF ($26,000.000.00 USD} TWENTY SIX MILLION DOLLARS

consider honestly(bank of africa)

If you have a pulse and an email inbox, you've probably gotten at least one, and probably dozens or more of these urgent "business proposals". Usually the sender is some unfortunate banker, son of a dead military officer, widow of a recently deposed African ruler or the like, who wants to make you the financial deal of a lifetime. As the geniuses at Scam o Rama explain:

Translated painfully into plain English, the writer claims to be in a position to skim public accounts. Hint: There is no money to be laundered - except yours. They tell you palms must be greased. They ask for money with which to do the greasing. A few K here, a few K there... eventually you get wise, and retire to lick your wounds. Variations include son of dead military officer, son of dead farmer, dead bank customer, reformed murderer, the imaginary request for bid, different countries (Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Togo...). Same scam.

With me so far? Good. Now here's where the genius part comes in... These guys not only reply to the Nigerian scammers, they string them along. They play them like a Stradivarius. They make the scammer send them money.

Like I said. Genius.

In the same vein, I came across The Chaos Project today. The same concept, (they call it Nigerian Scam Baiting), and perhaps a bit easier to read, since the various emails are color-coded to differentiate between the fraudster and the victim's messages.

Happy reading!

PS. Re: the title of this post. Lagos is a city in Nigeria, for those of you that cut Geography class in school.