How to get rich quick....or not! Scams and more...: GULF ONLINE PROMOTION

Saturday, July 11, 2009

GULF ONLINE PROMOTION

From: GULF ONLINE PROMOTION [mailto:info@gcc.com]
Sent: 11 July 2009 00:56
To: winners@gcc.com
Subject: Important Notification

Congratulations!! The results of the just concluded GULF ONLINE PROMOTION
a subsidiary of the G.C.C National Grants in conjuction with the Saudi
Arabian Government and the Emirates Foundation, Your email address has
emerged winner of US$1,420,000.00 (One Million Four Hundred And Twenty
Thousand United states Dollars only) from this promotion, To aknowledge
the receipt of this notification and for further claims instructions,
Contact your approved claims agent Mrs Zainab Al Fahad via
email:zainabfahad@live.com

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What is advance-fee fraud?

According to Wikipedia advance-fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance sums of money in the hope of realizing a significantly larger gain. Among the variations on this type of scam, are the Nigerian Letter (also called the 419 fraud, Nigerian scam, Nigerian bank scam, or Nigerian money offer, the Spanish Prisoner, the Black money scam as well as Russian/Ukrainian scam (also extremely widespread, though far less popular than the former). Both the so-called Russian and Nigerian scams stand for wholly dissimilar organised crime traditions, they therefore tend to use altogether different breeds of approaches.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Advance-fee fraud
The 419 scam originated in the early 1980s as the oil-based Nigerian economy declined. Several unemployed university students first used this scam as a means of manipulating business visitors interested in shady deals in the Nigerian oil sector before targeting businessmen in the west, and later the wider population. Scammers in the early-to-mid 1990s targeted companies, sending scam messages via letter, fax, or Telex. The spread of email and easy access to email-harvesting software made the cost of sending scam letters through the Internet low. In the 2000s, the 419 scam has spurred imitations from other locations in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, and, more recently, from North America, Western Europe (mainly UK), and Australia.
The number "419" refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code (part of Chapter 38: "Obtaining Property by false pretences; Cheating") dealing with fraud. The American Dialect Society has traced the term "419 fraud" back to 1992.
The advance-fee fraud is similar to a much older scam known as the Spanish Prisoner scam in which the trickster would tell the scam victim that a (fictitious) rich prisoner had promised to share (non-existent) treasure with the victim if the latter would send money to bribe the prison guards.
Insa Nolte, a lecturer of University of Birmingham's African Studies Department, stated that "The availability of e-mail helped to transform a local form of fraud into one of Nigeria's most important export industries."