TechPointer

We are pretty familiar with spam mails from Nigeria. An interesting story that a Nigerian spammer may tell you is somewhat like this - he is the son of an influential person (an African dictator/minister or something like that) who has died leaving a huge fortune, all that money will be confiscated if falls in the government’s hands and so you are to help him to get the money out of the country for which you get 15% share or may be even more.

My Yahoo account is full of such mails. One friend of mine had responded to such a mail (that was in 2002) though I told her it must be a scam. And that spammer had even sent a picture showing a box stashed with dollar notes! That man even rang up my friend to convince. However, my friend stopped there and did not go any further. But a few actually fall in the trap and get cheated. We have seen such cases in newspapers. In the United States itself, losses on account of African scams are estimated to be in the order of $100 million per year. Rediff columnist T P S Sreenivasan alerts us from Nigerian scams whose brother had recently been a victim of a scam - one that is of a new and more dangerous kind.