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Things I Did, Below

I, personally, receive email in HTML format. The following was received (and looked) like I received it. At the time, I was more interested in the message than the headers and do not have the original. This is a copy I forwarded to myself as I sent it to my father.

• I removed my email addresses. These came to various accounts and some no longer exist. There are places on this site you can get hold of me if you wish or need to. They are protected from spambots using JavaScript, but all you have to do is click on them.
• All scammer and related email addresses, and any actual website links have been changed, at least putting spaces into them. They appear as underlined blue links, though they aren't.
• Any notes I added in the actual letter are in square brackets ("[" "]"), are bold, red in color, and highlighted. If what I found "behind the links" (email or website) are different than what was displayed, I will include them in this type of note.
• All spelling, spacing, line-wrapping, and punctuation errors are the ones that appeared in the original received email. (I may or may not analyze some or all of these.)

Scam Example
Received 09/02/2000

Notes

This was the very first Nigerian Scam email I ever received. I forwarded it to my father, asking if he thought it was "for real". While waiting for an answer, I searched for the name, and found that it wasn't. (DAMN! I could really have used that money!)

Problems I see:

• Obvious (to me, anyway) errors:
  • The lines are all broken incorrectly. This appears to have been typed in a text word processing document, like Notebook, cut-and-pasted here, and was not "fixed". Seems kind of strange that a businessman would do something like that, when it's just as easy to type it into an email message, huh?
  • Spacing errors:
    • "DR.ISA PHILIPS" (TWICE... In the header & the signature.)
    • "EMAIL:isap @ libanismail.com"
    • "... it's nature of being utterly confidential.I am sure ..."
    • "... We are top  Officials of the ..." (extra space)
    • "... commence this business,we need your assistance ...
    • "... from 1983 to the present , we have ..."
    • "... ofUS$21,320,000.00 ( Twenty -One Million..."
    • "... THIS REFERENCE NUMBER(VE/S/09/99)IN ALL YOUR ..."
  • Punctuation errors (Like I do so well, huh?)
    • "... money in our names, in this regard I have been delegated ..."
    • "... States Dollars) hence we take the liberty to write you."
    • "... The money will be shared as follows:- "
    • "... Fax : 234 -1-7597594 Your Company's signed ..." (This could also be a "spacing" error, meaning maybe "Your Company's ..." should have started on another line.)
    • "... "Text" which we would send to you ..."
    • "... RESPONSES....."
  • Capitalization errors:
    • "...  Twenty -One Million, Three Hundred and Twenty Thousand United States Dollars ..."
    • "... enable us write letter of claim, and Job description by using your ..."
• I guess I can (kinda) forgive the other capitalization errors.
• Anyone else notice the extra space in front of a couple of lines, or, if they are supposed to be there because they're at the beginning of paragraphs, why are they not there for some?
• What about the lack of a space in front of #3 point?
• Did you notice that the "reference number" I'm to respond with is the month with a year earlier? (Forgot to change it?) My guess is the VE/S part are possibly the initials of the scammer.

My point here is that anyone who claims to be a member of the government, and uses many of the phrases and words used in this email, WOULD not and SHOULD not be making errors like the above. They should use a spell-checker, and, I would think, a grammar-checker.

While I had noted some of the above errors when I first got the email, as I copied it for this page, and realized I didn't have the email headers, I thought I should delineate all that I DID find.

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