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

Fraud email example:

From: Chris Abim <christabim03@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2023 15:39:00 +0100
Subject: Kindly revert to me as quickly as possible,

Sir,

I hope all is well with you and your family and I hope you will consider my
request favourably, on my desk is Mr. Richard's records retention of
identification data which is limited to five years, unfortunately he died
with no written specification about his country of origin. all of the
relevant facts about him was addressed to his resident locally here, with
no specific target were I could get useful information about his family
hence I make a choice from a range of possibilities to use google archive
and the description I got revealed your contact so, I thought I could share
this here with you, if you would be interested in a huge sum of
$17,597,000.00 he left in the bank. The last transaction on the account is
dated more than 10 years ago and there has been no contact to reach his
family, I'm afraid the money will be forfeited, and moved to the
government treasury as an unclaimed deposit.
If you cooperate, to take custody of it, I will put in place relevant
documents indicating you are the next of kin, to enable a claim before it
is paid to the government account because I'm sure that we can work out an
arrangement to achieve the transfer in a legal manner for a mutual benefit.
I suggest a meeting at a convenient time to talk about the matter while
thanking you for your understanding in advance.

Chris Abim

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