“Nigerian Scammers”
The email message had exciting news. The email message was from a lady in London who had been looking at my website. She referred to several of my paintings by their title. She said she wanted to purchase several of my original watercolor paintings. She said that her husband had been employed by a major firm in the U. S. to be their IT director so they would soon be moving to the U. S. She was purchasing the furnishings for their new home and wanted to include a number of my original paintings and drawings as part of the décor. She was so flattering about my paintings.
Since she intended to buy a number of my paintings and drawings she wanted to know if she could get a discount. Of course, I happily responded. The email messages between us started flying back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean. She said that she was expecting to have a baby any day so she might not immediately respond to my email messages if she were in the hospital delivering the baby.
As we start working out the details on which paintings she wanted and the corresponding prices, I inquired as to the address they were to be sent to. She responded that her shipping company that will be moving them to the U. S. will handle picking up the paintings from me. Then I start getting email messages from the shipping company as to size and weight of the framed paintings.
She just never seems to quite make up her mind and something just doesn’t seem right about the way her sentences are structured. I thought that this might be due to her being English and living in London. Although the English in her sentences was correct, it was kind of like talking to someone that speaks perfect English, but has a foreign accent.
As the emails went back forth, a little voice in the back of my mind starts to say “Something is just not right about this.”
About the fifth day of exchanging emails with this lady, my grandson Edmund walks into my studio from college and I tell him about this lady in London who wants to buy a number of my paintings. I let him know of my misgivings. He said he knows how to trace her email messages to see if she is really from London. He sits down at my computer and soon the location of her computer appears on the monitor screen.
We were shocked and stunned to see that she is actually from Odua, Nigeria. The computer search engine he is using also shows an orange arrow on a satellite photo pointing to a small village in the jungles of a national park in southern Nigeria. Zooming in on the satellite image, we can see the orange arrow pointing to a hut in the village. That must be where the computer is located that sent me the emails from someone pretending to be the lady from London who wanted to buy my paintings.
Edmund next checked the origin of the emails from the shipping company. Those emails came from the same computer from the same hut in the same village in Nigeria.
I just have to sit in wonder at this computer and Internet world that we live in. A Nigerian living in a tiny village at the end of a small narrow road in the jungles of southern Nigeria has a computer, internet access, and the knowledge to find on the Internet a website of an artist living in Houston. He also knows how to go about trying to get some money from this gullible artist.
Since I immediately stopped emailing my new “customer,” we never got to the point of seeing how she was going to attempt to get money from me.
Soon thereafter, I started getting similar type email inquiries from people in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia stating that had looked at my website and wanted to buy a number of my paintings. We checked out the location of their computers and they were all lying about who they said they were. I had to wonder, do these Internet scammers share information?
The scammer in Nigeria put his email address on my mail out list, so he will get this message along with you. Wouldn’t it be interesting if he responded and told us something about who he is and how he got into the Internet scamming business?
If he does respond, I will share his response with you.
Cheers,
Acree
<< Back to Email
Archive Page >>
|
