Scammers/spammers now posing as political activists and attorneys

I've seen a lot of variation of African scams, but now their is a version going around from persons claiming to be a political activist and attorney, proposing to want to secure campaign funds. I received a copy of one of these which is shown below entitled:

"Subj: Highly confidential information"
Posted Date: 7/29/06 7:20:54 PM Central Daylight Time
From: ***censored by CyberPatrol***
which reads as follows:

Dear friend

My name is Mr. Fui Tsikata, a political activist and an attorney. I am a member of my party’s executive committee.

My aim of contacting you is to crave your indulgence to assist us in securing some funds, abroad for safe keeping which incidentally was kept to help us finance the forth coming elections in 2008. Fortunately with my immediate assistance, and contact, we were able to deposit the money in a security vault abroad pending when the fund would be needed.

The need to contact you arose from the fact that the present government is cracking down on the opposition and trying to trace all the funds that belong to it, if they succeed in tracing this fund to us, they will seize it and thereby incapacitating our campaign abilities. We wish to relocate this fund in a foreigner's name to avoid any trace. All I need from you is an assurance that you can handle the amount involved (US$52,000,000) comfortably and that I can also trust you with this arrangement.

Be rest assured that there is no risk involved since I have taken care of everything. I want you to immediately inform me of your willingness in assisting and co-operating with us, so that I can send you full details of this transaction and let us make arrangement for a meeting and discuss at length on how to transfer this funds. I am able to give you my name without fear because I got your email address contact from a very reliable and dependable friend whose judgment I trust completely, so it would be appreciated if you can maintain the confidential nature of this letter and the whole transaction.

Please if you are not interested in this business, let me know in time, so that I can contact someone else. You can send your reply through my alternative email address for security measures : ***censored by CyberPatrol***

Yours sincerely,
Mr. Fui Tsikata

***END***

I have received numerous such scam letters in the past, perhaps owning to the fact that I have authored many articles and my work is widely published on the Internet along with my email address. Thus I guess once on a scammers shit list, always on a scammers shit list!

These type of scam letters are a real nusance. I'm not sure how to stop them. Anyone who honestly posts their email address on the Internet is obviously going to become a target of scammers, phisher and other low life. Given these people use free service providers and are often located off shore, there is really no way to stop them except, perhaps, by having unlisted email addresses.

My reason for reposting this particular scam email is simply to alert others to the fact such emails are a scam. If you get such an email probably the best thing to do is ignore it and/or block email from the address of the sender and/or any other reply email addresses. You may also report these type of scam emails to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) that they may block them from everyone's email.

I have seen so many variations of these scam emails that I wonder who has the time to write thest things? Obviously there is a cottage industry of scam artists that has grown up in Nigeria and other third world countries. What is so pitiful about these scam artists is that if they spent half as much time working to create real business opportunities on the Internet they could probably grow quite rich.

I guess there are just people who like to try to rip off other people or get some sick pleasure out of creating and shoveling piles of dung in the form of scam emails. People who seek to hurt and harm others, who seek to scam others out of their money with get rich quick scheme offers and ploys, really are a degenerate sort. It makes me wish there were some sort of electronic rat trap people could install on their email boxes that would automatically fire back a reply in the form of a killer virus that would wipe out all the data on the hard drives of these scammers and phishers!

Should anyone have some other ideas for how to deal with these scammers and phishers I would love to hear your suggestions. Please post your comments. Thanks.