There is something magical about the word “fraudster” especially when it shows up in the latest Nigerian email scams landing in my junk folder. Maybe the authors [sic] of these Nigerian email scams just love the sound of the word, or it’s all they know hearing themselves called a fraudster so often.
The word itself seems to be of recent origin; based on where you research via Google, it was coined between the years 1960 to 1975. Earlier versions were plain old fraud (1850), fraudsman (1610s) and frauditor (1550s), all according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. I personally prefer frauditor (based on some less-than-pleasant dealings with auditors, but I digress…).
Here is the complete email I received with no corrections whatsoever.
FROM: UNITED NATIONS POLICE,
REGARDING RECOVERY OF YOUR LOST MONEY.Attn: Beneficiary
We hereby inform you that the Scotland Yard Police, Interpol, Federal Bureau of Investigation, (FBI) United States of America, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) of Nigeria and all the African Crime fighter leaders have come together to stop scam/internet fraud in Nigeria and all round Africa. We have recovered over US$2.6 Billion Dollars from the people we have behind bars.
Our duty is to make sure we stop internet scam and money laundering. As for today we have put a lot of fraudsters in jail. We go all over Africa to pick this internet rats,We have over 8,273 of them in our jail around Africa and we are still looking for more. We are aware that a lot of foreigners out there have been deceived and lost their hard earn money to these fraudsters after promising them percentages in their letters/e-mails for their impending help to move funds out Africa including fake lottery winning notification and at the end of the day, they will collect thousands of dollars from you without a successful end. It was agreed that to retain the good image of our country and the rest of African countries, all the victims who lost his/her hard earn money to these faceless thieves will be compensated with just US$500,000,00 (five hundred thousand Dollars).
This we assume will help you to start a new life. Please, we apologies that you take our offer as little as it is due to the fact that (victims) in our pay list are too numerous. We en-back on this pay back from the money we recovered from these fraudsters, So you are advise to contact Mr Phillip John in the United State.
let him know if you are still interested to get your Master Card to you today as he have been waiting to hear from you to help him complete this delivery to you. contact him with your personal information bellow for your Master Card clearance and delivery.
Provide your details and forward it to Mr Phillip John to is contact details below or you call his number .+2348065322902
FULL NAME…
ADDRESS….
COUNTRY….
PHONE NUMBER…
AGE….Agent Name: Mr Phillip John
Address Email: phillipjohn@instructor.net
Cell: +2348065322902Thank and remain Bless
Mr. Michael J. Burn.
Supervising Manage
It’s so interesting to come across an email such as this one, so thoroughly peppered with misspelled words and grammatical land mines. And yet there are people out there in the world who’ll get one of these and accept it as perfectly proper English, and just enough to actually bite. After all, there must be some sort of success rate, otherwise I wouldn’t get this crap in my spam folder.
Normally I would redact details such as phone numbers and so-called legitimate email addresses, but not this time.
I give this one a fraudster ranking of ‘4’ because of the number of times the word is used in the email, plus one for the fact it was sent by a fraudster. I may come up with some more elaborate ranking in the future, but for now I think this suffices.
Radarwitch
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