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"419" Scam – Advance Fee / Fake Lottery Scam

The so-called "419" scam is a type of fraud dominated by criminals from Nigeria and other countries in Africa. Victims of the scam are promised a large amount of money, such as a lottery prize, inheritance, money sitting in some bank account, etc.

Victims never receive this non-existent fortune but are tricked into sending their money to the criminals, who remain anonymous. They hide their real identity and location by using fake names and fake postal addresses as well as communicating via anonymous free email accounts and mobile phones.

Keep in mind that scammers DO NOT use their real names when defrauding people.
The criminals either abuse names of real people or companies or invent names or addresses.
Any real people or companies mentioned below have NO CONNECTION to the scammers!

Read more about such scams here or in our 419 FAQ. Use the Scam-O-Matic to verify suspect emails.

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Fraud email example:

From: hen willy <henwilly02@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 14:57:05 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Read and get back to me


Mr Henry Williams
EKO-Bank Plc
15 Rue Du Guinean
Portvovo, REP. D'Benin
West Africa.

Gooday Dear,

"CONFIDENTIAL"

With due regards, I am Mr. Henry Williams a staff in the bills and exchange at the foreign remittance Department, of ECOBank Benin . I am writing following the impressive information about you from our chambers of commerce and industry. And I do hope my letter will not embarrass you, since I have no previous correspondence with you.

In my department, we discovered an abandoned sum of (US$9.5m) Nine million, Five hundred thousand united states dollars only, in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customers Edward Cherry who was involve and died along with his entire family in November 2003 in a plane crash.

Since we got information about his death, we have been expecting his next of kin to come over and claim his money because we cannot release it unless somebody applies as a next of kin or relation to the deceased as indicated in our banking guidelines.

Unfortunately we learn that his supposed next of kin or relations died along with him at the crash leaving nobody behind for the claim. It is therefore upon this discovery that I and other officials in the department now decided to make business with you, that is, to release the money to you as the next of kin or relation to the decease since nobody is fronting for the money and we do not want this fund to go into disbursement account as unclaimed bill.

The banking law and guidelines here stipulates that if such money remained unclaimed after four years the money will be transferred into Federal Government account as unclaimed fund. The request of a foreigner as next of kin in this business is occassioned by the fact that the customer was a foreigner and an indigene can not stand as a next of kin to a foreigner.

We agreed that 30% of this money will be for you as the foreign partner and 10% for expenses incurred during the cost of remittance. Therefore to enable immediate transfer of the fund to you as arranged, you should contact me with this e-mail address immediately for further briefing: henwilly02@uymail.com

Please include your phone and fax numbers when replying.
I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards.

Henry Williams,
Foreign Remittance Dept
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/12/26/benin.crash/index.html






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