[Ansteorra] Nigerian Scam Comes to the Phone

[C. L. Ward]

Well, yesterday the Nigerian Scam came to my telephone.

You know the one - usually it's email telling you that some lawyer or banker
or executor of some person in some Third-World country is gonna give you
thousands of dollars... if you can just help them out of a minor jam with
some cash of your own.

Yesterday the AT&T TDD operator called saying I had a call from a
hearing-impaired person and that she was going to narrate the print input as
she received it.  The caller wanted "Gunnora Hallakarva".  About three
sentences later, they transmitted, "I am a lawyer in Nigeria". What followed
was the classic "Nigerian Scam", delivered by phone.

So I stopped the operator and informed her that this was the same Nigerian
scam that they've been running in email, and tried to get the phone number
from her (no way she'd give it to me) then urged her to report it to law
enforcement as well.

Not five minutes later some dude with a foreign accent called me directly
and started in with the whole Nigerian scam deal again.  I let him go on a
while, while digging through my email trash can.  Sure enough, he was
reading the exact same script as one of the Nigerian scam emails.  So I hung
up on him.

DANG! if the &^%$#@! didn't call me right back.  Neither time did their
phone number show up on my caller ID, and they wouldn't give me their phone
number.

Why I mention this to y'all is, while my elderly relatives aren't much for
computers, they do all have telephones, and they might in fact be sucked in
by something like this.  Apparently a bunch of people have been sucked in
over the past few years by the email variant, or else the scammers wouldn't
keep doing it.  I'm guessing that enough people now are wised up to this
scam and have email filters and spam filters blocking them that they're
having to move to phone.  So I've taken the time to contact relatives and
explain this all to them and warn them in advance should they get one of
these losers on the phone not to be sucked in!

The good news thus far is that they are apparently pulling their data from
the web, or they would not have "Gunnora Hallakarva" connected with my home
phone number.  But it's probably only a matter of time before the jerks
start buying phone lists just like many other advertisers.

Some good info on the Nigerian Scam:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/nigeria.htm
http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml
http://www.bbb.org/alerts/article.asp?ID=126
http://www.bbb.org/alerts/article.asp?ID=360
http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2001/08/07/419scams/print.html
http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/

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