Last Friday, a Nigerian 419-scammer was sentenced to jail for 376 years by a Lagos court. Harrison Odiawa was convicted for “stealing, forgery, impersonation and conspiracy to obtain money by false pretences” contrary to the Advance Fee Fraud Act, the Nigerian Daily Independent reports.

Harrison Odiawa, 38, alias Abu Belgori, managed to extract $1,939,710 from US national George Robert Blake on the promise of a percentage of a bogus 20.45 millian dollars Ministry of Health contract. The classic advance fee scam, which you will find numerous examples of here, saw a duped Blake transfer the “advance payments” after seeing forged documents - including a certificate of registration with the Corporate Affairs Ministry and the aforementioned forged Ministry contract - which convinced him he was indeed about to get rich.

Blake raised the cash from his company, Quest Exploration and Development, and his own personal assets.

Related reading:
home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/news2006.htm
www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/14/419er_jailed/

Share This

Take a few seconds and try to imagine that one of these lottery notifications where actually legitimate. Imagine winning 2.5 million dollars from a e-mail collecting service that had harvested your e-mail address from the web, and then just wanted to hand out all that cash to you.

Yeah. Pretty hard to believe, isn’t it? Especially if they didn’t even know your email address, as is the case with the below notification from the Loterie Nationale, “Mrs. Wendy Johnson” and “Peter van Dijk”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Share This

If there was indeed a company running a lottery called the 6 Ball Games Lottery handing out cash prizes of 2 million pounds, wouldn’t you think that they would have a functioning web site? Wouldn’t you expect them to send out their winning notifications from their own domain rather than from an msn.com address? And last, wouldn’t you expect them to send you a unique e-mail addressed to you only on such an important matter as a payout of 2,000,000 Pounds is?

Read the rest of this entry »

Share This

Nobody knows what went wrong when Promotion Director “Alvaro Manuel Pablo” or agent Vincente Garcia where compilating and sending out this lottery scam spam. They only sent one mail, but they managed to repeat their message four times in the same e-mail. And it’s a lottery scam allright. It bears all the markers such as a redicilously large amount of 805,550.90 Euros (I kind of wonder how they agreed on that ammount), the warning not to go public due to the risk of a “mix up of numbers and winning email addresses”, the need for a speedy reply, and of course the fact they they don’t even seem to know what email address they have sent the mail to…

Read the rest of this entry »

Share This