E-mail scam?

Received this letter several days ago:

"I am Eng. Michael David, a seismic. Engineer with Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC). My senior / boss colleague Late Engineer Andre Ivanov, a National of your country, who worked with shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) in Nigeria as the head of drilling operations herein after, shall be referred to as the late.

On Nov14, 2005 my boss, his wife, and their three children were involved in fatal air crash in Lisa village near Otta, in Ogun state South West region of Nigeria. All persons on board unfortunately lost their lives. Since then I have made several inquiries to your embassy to locate any of my clients extended Relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful.
After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to trace his last name over the Internet, to locate any member of his family
Hence, I have contacted you. I contacted you to assist us in repatriating the money and property he left behind before they get confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank where this huge deposit were lodged.
Particularly, the ECO BANK NIGERIA PLC, where the deceased had an account Valued at about ($10.5 million u s dollars) has issued me a notice to provide the next of kin else they have the account confiscated within the next ten official working days.
Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for over 2 months now, I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased so that this account valued at ($10.5million u s dollars) can be paid to you and then you and me could share the money.60% to me and 40% to you An attorney will be contracted to help notarize all the necessary legal documents that can be used to back up any claim we may make.

All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us seeing this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement which shall protect you from any breach of the law.


Please promptly acknowledge receipt of this mail

Best regards

Eng. Michael David. "

Of course I did not respond, but tried searching on snopes.com to see if that had any info about it and came up empty.

How would this party even get my e-mail address? I thought I was being careful about how I use the internet, but apparently not?

Vicki

 

Spam, Spam, Scam ...... Delete and forget.
They want your banking information / personnel identity.
When you read their sob story, just remind yourself ... they have one intent, to take advantage of you.

 

Your e-mail address is out there... mine is out there... all of ours are out there. They have bots that crawl newsgroups, forums and so forth and while you may do all in your power to prevent your address from becoming public property, a friend to whom you e-mail a message may end up forwarding that message to whomever and bingo... away goes your privacy. Bottom line: as Dennis says, delete it and forget it. Whatever you do, do not respond to it, even in a sarcastic manner. It simply confirms for them the validity of your e-mail. And if it persists, you may want to look into purchasing a reliable anti-spam program (i.e. Spam Assassin ... there are many others).

 

so far I have gotten over 10 different letters like this . Some are telling me there is money in over seas bank accounts that have my name on. Others tell me it is a long lost family member that set up some account .
I just report them to my ISP and delete the email.
Lets face it no one give you anything for free when it comes to money.
As for free help to any question this is the best place for answers.

 

Hi Vicki, we get all those scams here in New Zealand. Just hit Shift/Delete and totally ignore. These scammers make $50.000.00 per week with their purile stories. There are lots of people who get suckered into thinking they will become multi millionaires overnight and we had a case of a little old dear who lost all of her savings about $70.000.00 NZD and her family still couldn't convince her it was a scam. Neil.

 

e-mail scam

i have two email addresses
one for friends and work and one web based (hotmail, yahoo ect) i use for everything else that way when you start to get to many spam just get a new one


but as far as the scam emails i started to get a few so did a bit of reseach about reporting them,
nothing much you can do as they are not illegal,


tell your friends and as many people as you can so that nobody is scammed

but a little thing that i did find that i like to do is to send the email back to the domain with "ABUSE" at the front ie
MichaelDavid@hotmail.com > abuse@hotmail.com
i've even had replys saying the account has been shut down

 

Vicki - these are known as "419s" - you'll find a detailed description and advice on handling them here: http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/

 

Thanks everyone!

I have since deleted the e-mail (and did not reply to it!). I have seen/read about other "Nigeria" e-mail scams, but this one was "new" to me.

Never gave it a thought about how a person's e-mail address could be generated on the web through e-mails to others (if they forward something, etc.). Thanks for enlightening me with that info!

My spam filters must work fairly well, as I don't really get that much spam mail (maybe 4-5 a week??).

Appreciate all the helpful info!

Regards,
Vicki

 

obviously its a scam. i received that kind of mail too. i dont know why they send like that maybe they are just trying to annoy people but for those who believes in that kind of stuff im not sure when did he learn about scams. just forget it and delete it in your inbox. its a waste of space.

 

Use disposable email addresses while joining/posting to fourms/discussion groups etc if you are unsure.You always can change to your original address later on

 

Hi Vicki, since I replied to your query I have had at least another 7 or 8 scam emails. They come from Hong Kong, Singapore and Europe not only Nigeria. I had one in my mailbox today asking me to contact them urgently to discuss moving $19.000.000.00 USD. from an HSBC a/c in Singapore! SHIFT DELETE and forget it. Neil.

 

BOA Scam

I got several ofical looking emails asking me to update my information on my BOA account.

I don't have a BOA account.

 

Fortunately, they sometimes get caught:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7353003.stm