Scam Spam

You heard about them on T.V. and you read about them in the newspapers or on the internet, and you wonder (at least I did): do they really think that people will fall for those idiotic scams? Well, I was the recipient of such a scam spam recently. Lucky me….. J In case you are not fortunate enough to have received one, I wanted to share my experience with you. Here is the email. This is not the traditional Nigerian scam but an offshoot of it coming from Ivory Coast apparently.

Of course the hook for me was that the wealthy African young man is supposed to buy real estate through me and also offer 20% of the $9.5M as compensation for acting as guardian and all in exchange for my bank account information. What a deal! Who wouldn’t jump at such a sure thing? Why bother buying lottery tickets when you can get $1.9M for doing nothing? FREE MONEY. Yahoo!

I started doing a little research just to find out more about this phenomenon and discovered that it is apparently serious enough and effective enough that people are actually victimized by these scams. Some people apparently are put in physical danger by being conned into traveling to Africa and are put in further jeopardy and even murdered. These scams are severe enough that people are trying to fight them at their own game.


So there it is, don’t fall victim to such hoaxes, but as amazing as it sounds, apparently lots of people are falling prey to these scams. It says something about the greed factor in our society….. Please keep your greed in check, and all jokes aside, don’t ever contemplate traveling abroad to collect money that sounds too good to be true.


Steve Mun, Silicon Valley Realtor
www.stevemun.com