One thing I have been looking into a lot lately is all the scams going around these days.
One thing that baffles me is that people actually fall for them, I get a lot of those email scams of various types every day since I have an email address used for signups to newsletters, etc..
The one that amuses me the most is the “Winnie Mandela”/“Nigerian prince” scam.
It goes something like this: “Winnie Mandela” or some “Nigerian prince” want to get millions of dollars out of Africa, and need needs your help to do so by sending the money to your account so you can send it to an account in Switzerland/Caymans/other tax haven asking few questions.
Of course, to do this, they needs you to pay the fees for the transaction, this can be anything from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, something that of course have to be paid to them in advance, usually through western union or other payment service that is difficult to trace.
There are many red flags with these scams, the biggest are that Winnie Mandela has been dead since 2018 and the closest Nigeria has been to having a royal family in the last 400+ years was when it was under British colonial rule.
another red flag is that nobody with that kind of money would trust some random person enough to expect getting the money back.
I see many of those scams every day, none are very believable, so how do people fall for this?
It’s very simple, these people are preying on people that they believe are gullible enough to believe it either by greed, or the hope that it could possibly be true.
It’s the same with all the dating scams, someone claim to be looking for a partner, usually targeting elderly women, and using their victims emotions to get her to send them money after they “got attacked”, “house burned down”, “visa cost” so he can come visit her… it’s all lies and part of the con to get as much money as possible out of their victims of course.
Another thing I have come across a lot lately are the random phone calls (like the amazon voicemail scam).
It works like this: you get a phone call with some robot voice telling you that there is a refund waiting for you and to get the money you need to call the provided number. (Or press some number on a menu), this will connect you to a scammer that wants to connect to your computer before they ask you to access your internet banking before they black out your screen so you can’t see them stealing all your money.)
These scammers are often based in India, but will claim to either be in the states or Europe and have common english or American names. Some even claim to never having been to India when you ask if they are actually where they claim to be, or if they are in India.
As anyone that knows Indian people or are from India knows, people from India tend to have a distinct accent.
and it’s very rare to find an Indian person called “Joe black”, “John Thomas” or “Michelle Rochester” or other common English names.
It baffles me how easy these scammers are able to con people in to giving them money.
Below I have added some youtube channels I follow in regards to this problem.