The African Canned Ham Scam
Checking my Sitemeter stats today I noticed an unusual referral from search.yahoo.com. It seesm that someone from the African nation to Mauritius found their way to this blog by searching on this string:
classified phone and email address contact for business people in south america for 2006
This isn't the first time. Interestingly, that search yields 289,000 hits and this blog shows up as number 13. I would have never guessed this to be the case. The one question that comes to mind here is this: why do they want these phone number and email addresses? The most likely answer is that they are looking for perpetuate one of the longest running and most successful email scams around.
As all of us who have received the infamous "Nigerian" scam email know, the success of this ruse relies on two things: human frailties like gullibility, misplaced compassion, avarice, and pride and the law of large numbers. The scam works because while perhaps 99.99% of us delete these emails without a second's thought, 0.01% of 1million people is 100 people. When anyone shows an interest he is told that he must first hand over a substantial amount of money to cover expenses such as banking fees and administrative costs. Of those, the scammer only needs one mark, just another 1%, to make himself wealthy, even by Nigerian standards.
Yesterday's new brought word that one of the most noted psychiatrists in the US fell prey to this ruse:
An eminent US psychiatrist has fallen victim to Internet scammers who have defrauded him of millions of dollars, according to reports on Friday.
Guy Gottschalk, the son of 89-year-old psychiatrist Dr Louis Gottschalk, has reportedly filed papers in a California court in which he states that his father was tricked into sending up to $3m (£2m) to the fraudsters, in the hope of receiving a substantial sum back.
Guy Gottschalk is seeking to remove his father as administrator of the family's $8m estate.
Dr Louis Gottschalk, who still works at the University of California, Irvine, famously claimed in 1987 that President Ronald Reagan's mental abilities may have started to become impaired as early as 1980, at the start of his presidency.
"While it seems unlikely, even ludicrous, that a highly educated doctor like [Gottschalk] would fall prey to such an obvious con, that is exactly what happened," Guy Gottschalk's attorney wrote in court papers, according to the LA Times.
Louis Gottschalk is said to dispute this claim, and in his own court papers says his son was carrying out a "vendetta" against him. He said that he had instead lost $900,000 in "some bad investments".
If this story is even true, there are many possible explanations for how Mr. Gottschalk got got by this scam. Like the president whom he previous judged, his mental abilities may be impaired. It may be that he is in full possession of his faculties but has not conquered that one of the seven deadly sins known as greed. Few of us have. And maybe, like this man, he thought he could con the con-men, though I seriously doubt it.
Most of us recognise the Nigerian email scam and delete the messages. A few poor souls get sucked in and lose their savings. But Rich Siegel spotted the fraud, entered into an exchange for his own entertainment, and published the emails for ours.His book, Tuesdays with Mantu: My Adventures with a Nigerian Con Artist, lets you follow his adventures as he takes the scammers on at their own game.
Much as the fraudsters embellish their emails with tales of dead relatives, government corruption and vast fortunes, Siegel revels in his characters. He tells Mantu of his own late Uncle Fred; of the great flange drought of 1979; of his job at the Tool & Dye Factory; of his daughters, Rhianon, Jewel, Tiffany and Cher. He asks Mantu for a small advance; he encourages Mantu to donate to Pastor Ralph Malph's collection for victims of the Iranian earthquake. And still Mantu fails to see that he is wasting his time. The correspondence only ends when Siegel fakes his own decapitation.
Now I have no intention or desire to enage any con men in email exchanges, let alone to fake my own decapitation to bring the conversations to an end. I have much better things to do with my time. But I am curious to see what will happen now that the aforementioned search string will be showing up at the top of yahoo results. I wonder if the spam will be in Spanish.
Tags: spam | scam | scams | Fraud | Frauds | gottschalk | psychiatrist
Links: Conservative Cat |
See also: Champagne for My Real Friends | The African Canned Ham Scam |
Comments
As all of us who have received the infamous "Nigerian" scam email know, the success of this ruse relies on two things: human frailties like gullibility, misplaced compassion, avarice, and pride and the law of large numbers.
Posted by: bob | November 11, 2006 10:34 AM