This is an example of a 419 scam. An advance-fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. Now folks if you get an email like this one, and you will, DELETE IT.
CENTRAL BANKOF NIGERIA
FROM THE DESK OF THE DIRECTOR FOREIGN OPERATIONS CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA(CBN)
TINUBU SQUARE,VICTORIA ISLAND,LAGOS NIGERIA.
Email:[removed]@hotmail.com
Date:21-11-2007
Our Ref:CBN/IRD/CBX/021l/07DEAR BENEFICIARY
This is to bring to your notice that CBN has concluded all formalities regarding the payment of your contract/inheritance fund. Remember, I Mr Usman Bello asked you to give me ten (10) months to investigate your claim of ownership to avoid paying this fund to a ghost beneficiary, hence my writing to inform you that I am set now to proceed with the transfer.
During my investigations, I found out that your name and contract number were changed by Rev.Maxwell Smith John, Wale R. Philips and Sir. Benjamin Williams who claimed to be your partner here in Nigeria and that is why this payment has not been made to you since there is what seems to be two claim of ownership over one particular fund. As a matter of fact, it was obviously discovered that this second claimers have been into the business of diverting contractors/Next of Kin Inheritance funds with the help of Dr.Shamsuddeen Usman the Deputy Governor on Operation in CBN for the past 15 years. In fact, the action of having two different individuals claiming one particular fund led to my confiscating many funds since I assumed office as the Foriegn Operation Manager of CBN, not until I got to know that it is the antics of fraudsters and some corrupt officials working in Central Bank of Nigeria to lay claims on contractors/Inheritance funds after extracting their respective contract information’s from them.
Note: that the mode of payment is by Electronic Wire Transfer or Certify Bank Draft. The choice is yours.I trust that you will attend to this matter expeditiously for a speedy conclusion of the transaction.Kindly respond back to this Email,[removed]@hotmail.com
Yours in Service,
Mr Usman Bello.
Director Foreign Operation, Central Bank of Nigeria (cbn).
D/L 234-8034188788
The aforementioned example is a complete scam. I would hope that the hotmail.com email address would be a dead giveaway but, I get several emails a week asking if these are real. They’re not. Gmail has a great feature that you can use to fight back against junk spam like this.
Click that button. Don’t reply to emails like this that you might/will receive. They are scammers trying to prey one you. This one, for example, originated from a California IP address.
X-Originating-IP: [67.201.38.209]
Reply-To: <[REMOVED]@hotmail.com>
From: usman bello <[REMOVED]@hotmail.com>
Subject: IMMIDIATE CONTRACT PAYMENT NOTIFICATION
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:52:29 +0000
The spelling mistakes are always fun.
[tags]Spam, Phishing, Email Scam, 419[/tags]