Thursday, 1 April 2010

Where do scammers come from?

I can hear a child asking it’s parent: “Daddy, where do scammers come from?” You can imagine the slightly embarrassed parent answering: “Well son, when a Mummy scammer and a Daddy scammer love each other very much…”

But where DO they come from? Is it a family business passed down from one generation to the next? Is it something that school kids in certain countries aspire to be? Some want to be a soldier, others a doctor or lawyer and a small group want to grow up to become scammers?

Presumably there’s money in it, otherwise there would be so many people doing all the scamming.

There IS, in fact money in it if our case this week is anything to go by.

A consumer contacted us saying that after visiting an African entrepreneurship forum on the internet he had been contacted by a company calling itself First Morgan Capital Group. They had invited him to apply for a major loan to fund his new business idea. Quite quickly they offered him the massive sum of over P2 million. He was delighted of course and was ready to accept when they dropped a slight bombshell. Before they could give him the money he needed to come up with a security guarantee of 7% of the loan value. They told him that this was just in case he defaulted on the loan repayments but they assured him that the sum would be safely looked after by a bank in Singapore.

Did I mention that at no stage in this process did these supposedly major investors actually meet their potential recipient face-to-face? Did I mention that all he had to do to get this loan was to send them a completed application form and a business plan?

However it was after that demand for 7% that he became suspicious. They were, after all, asking him for almost P150,000 of his own money before he could have the “investment”.

I assume that like him and me, you are now suspicious? You too can smell an “advance fee” fraud approaching?

It didn’t take long to confirm that this was a scam. Firstly there’s the First Morgan Capital web site which you should visit to see how professional these things can be. On the web site they give a profile of their supposed company and give addresses in both Switzerland and Peru. However it took me a matter of minutes to establish that their Swiss address was a fake. All the phone numbers they give are answered by an answering machine in English, which is strange as you would expect either German or Spanish, don’t you think?

The web site gives examples of recipients of their generous investments but, curiously, none of them actually seem to exist. Pretending to be rather gullible I then contacted the company and asked a few naïve questions. Who were their backers, what criteria do they use for selecting recipients and could they give me a named contact from a successful recipient please?

Within a few hours I got an email from someone calling himself “Kenneth Jones” who gave me a contact in Jamaica who he said ran a fleet of buses and who had been lent US$ 1.5 million. Isn’t it strange that neither the name nor the phone number actually exists?

Like the “traditional” 419 “advance fee” scams the scammers realise that almost everyone will realise it’s a scam sooner or later but they only have to catch a small number to make a very decent living. If they just get one or two people to call for this particular scam each month they could easily make a few million Pula a year. It’s almost tempting to start your own scam isn’t it? Well it is if you have no conscience, no morals and you are a thieving piece of excrement.

Luckily the potential victim who contacted us was skeptical enough to seek advice when they demanded all that cash. He’s been smart enough to avoid losing a small fortune.

Will you be too?

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