Please alert your friends.
People on my contact list got this about a year ago. Took me forever to get back into the account. They also got into my FB page. It was someone in Nigeria.
The disturbing thing was that it was sent from another friend's account which had been hacked. A few calls to the family of the supposed victim quickly revealed the scam attempt.
Yes I got one of these as well from what appeared to be a friend of mine. The reason I new it was fraud was because my friend is a Navy Seal Commander.
The line about tears in my eyes LOL right - not very likely. And Mugged? probably not.
I called the guy and told him his hotmail account had been hacked and some creep was trying to scam his friends list in his name.
Most of these are not that hard. No personal contact (at least phone), no money.
This one is well known. Because they use your real friend’s info, some of these scams must be successful or they wouldn’t keep trying it.
>> Writing and punctuation are a bit off.
Duh, yeah... in a Nigerian sort of way.
I replied "I am here"
Almost immediately got back "My family and I are in terrible trouble".
Now I know this woman is well off and takes flying lesson for example. I also know she is currently visiting family in Palm Spring. On top of that I am the most casual of friends (we belong to one common organization, but different clubs).
Given this, I was pretty sure it was a fake, so I simple saved a screen shot of our supposed chat and emailed her immediately. Of course, she was fine and appalled. I just told her to change her facebook password.
I guess for all of you, never believe anything sent to you on the internet. Always verify in person. For example you could have asked for the name of the Hotel in London and called them and asked to speak to your friend.
Honest truth - I have an friend (an American) who WAS mugged in London a number of years ago. FWIW.
London England for a short vacation and i was mugged at gun point
Don’t ever click on links from sites you don’t know — particularly when they have some odd extensions (instead of .com or .org they might have .sk for example). I use facebook and there are a number of spammers posting advertising for this and that — such as free Ipads. You don’t get the free Ipad, but what happens is that the spammer can hack into your facebook account (or your email account if you opened the link from your junk mail). Then the spammer starts sending out email and posting to facebook under your name. Even worse, some hackers have been able to tap into your personal information, and if you have any identifying information in your email or facebook account (Social Security or credit card numbers for example), you are screwed. Get some good software that will prevent you from opening unsafe links and do your part by not clicking on links or opening email from anyone you don’t know.
Same thing happened to me, someone hacked my Facebook account and started sending messages to my friends and family on there, saying I was stuck in London with no money. Luckily I was at work at the time, so when my mom and sister called there I answered the phone and told them I was obviously fine. I put an immediate alert to all other friends and family that I had been hacked, luckily none of them fell for it. Dirty scammers.
I got a similar e-mail from my ex-boyfriend’s account a year or so ago. I knew instantly it was a scam as he would never go to London for a vacation.
I benefit from the fact that I have a very small group of friends and they don’t travel, so it’s quite easy for me to spot a scam like this. Still, be wary.
“Hope you do not get taken, like I almost did.”
My folks did, to the tune of $4K. Goes to show you, sometimes loyalty and the desire to help get the best of even former spooks. It took the third email for my dad to start questioning and make some background calls.
Colonel, USAFR
Nigerian scammer. NEVER, under any circumstances, send cash abroad. If you absolutely must help a friend, buy them a ticket on your credit card from an airline and be sure that it is refundable by you.
If you get a letter like this one, trash it.
44 is not necessarily a UK number. Mobile phone numbers in Nigeria can use it to re-direct calls to make it appear the person is in the UK when they are actually in Nigeria.
If a person requests a cash payment from WU/MG, its always a front to fleece you. If they won’t take a credit card payment, it always smells fishy.
Like the old, true and trite saying has it, “if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.” Be careful and exercise due diligence.
Some bottom-feeder hacked my facebook account yesterday morning with the exact same scam! I got about 15 calls from friends asking if it were true; that’s the incredulous part...come on now! Anyway, what the scammer did was get into my account, then change my password and email contact address to a new email address that I don’t have and that I never had. I changed my real email password and notified facebook. Right now, my facebook account is frozen. Only one person mentioned the discrepancy in the email address.