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CHRIS-VINCENT: How Come These Internet Fraudsters Are So STUPID? | How My Email Won 800 Thousand Dollars in An America Lottery

Lottery

The dumbest fraudsters I’ve come across in life are those internet ones who send random emails out—trying to get you to open some file, send you some huge money they claim to have, those saying you’ve won a lottery and lastly, those who claim to be from a certain bank.

Sometimes, I spare a minute to ask myself this; do these people ever get to scam anyone out there with these old widespread lame tricks? But, it must be working for them somehow—else, why have they not decided to alter the same old obvious scam they’ve been peddling for many years?

To me, they are deeply stupid and lazy—you must also be deeply greedy or stupid to fall for their tricks.

If you have an email address, I am sure you’ve received several emails from some people who claim to be surviving spouses, children or relatives of a rich African billionaire who left behind huge sums of cash—and they intend to transfer this cash to you or intend to make you the beneficiary.

This line of scam has been going on since emails became available and yet, they continue to push it. I even got an email like this yesterday from a certain Hussein from Libya. I don’t even believe that email came from Libya…

And then we have those who work for a big unheard-of lottery organisations, carrying the good news of your huge winnings.  A few years ago, I decided to play a little dumb to one of these emails to see how far it will get for an experience purpose—and it was really interesting.

Out of the blue, I got an email from a certain Elizabeth who said she was in charge of accounts at a lottery firm in Ohio, USA and that my email address had somehow been selected randomly as a winner of their annual lottery. She added that, I had won 800,000 dollars so she was writing to congratulate me and ask for my details so they can swiftly send out my cheque.

Of course I knew this was one of those stupid attempts at scam; because no one will give out such a huge sum of money to anyone for free—more also, for a lottery that you did not even enter into. But I decided to play along and quickly wrote back…

In my reply, I mentioned that I was really excited to have heard the news—and in fact the timing was so right because I needed a bit of money to add to a large loan I had taken to purchase a Yacht as I was moving to Liechtenstein. Take note of the country I picked, I doubt a Yacht will be of any good use there—but they were too stupid to even spot my sarcasm.

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