joewein.net   joewein.de LLC
fighting spam and scams on the Internet
Try our spam filter!
Free trial for 30 days
  jwSpamSpy

Home
About Us
Spam
419/Nigeria
Fraud
Contact

"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.

Click here to report a problem with this page.

 

 

Some comments by the Scam-O-Matic about the following email:

Fraud email example:

From: "Webmaster Admin Term" (may be fake)
Reply-To: <adminw@unlimitedmail.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:40:23 +0530
Subject: Dear. Our Account User,

Dear. Our Account User,

We regret to announce to you that we will be making some vital
maintainance on our Webmail system. During this process you might have login problems in signing into your Online account, to prevent this, you will have to confirm your account immediately after you receive this notification.

To confirm and to keep your account active during and after this maintenance process, please reply to this message with the below account information.

Failure to do this might result to a permanent deactivation of your user account from our database to enable us create more spaces for new users and to also reduce spam input.

KINDLY PROVIDE YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION FOR CONFIRMATION

Email Address:
Email Password:
Date of birth:

Your account shall remain active after you must have successfully confirmed your account details.

Thanks for bearing with us.

Webmaster Administrative Team

Anti-fraud resources: