Yep, like the title says, before long I’ll be rolling in the dough! I received an email this morning from the distinguished attorney for the estate of my late uncle Mogumbu Rouse. I never knew Uncle Mogumbu personally, but according to the email he was a rather wealthy prince in my ancestral homeland of Nigeria (and all these years I thought my ancestors on both sides were European). Anyway, he passed away recently, and as luck would have it I’m the sole beneficiary of his $18 million estate!
Of course as a show of good faith, I’ll be required to immediately wire $5,000 U.S. dollars into a Nigerian trust account and provide my bank account information so that the trustee of the estate can deposit my load of cash into it. But I can surely jump through their hoops if I’m going to inherit a fortune, right? Well, gotta go for now – I have to hurry on over to the bank…
Actually, I receive several emails like this each and every day, and my guess is you do as well. They’re really nothing more than extremely poorly disguised phishing scams, with the scammer hoping to entice one or two really greedy (and really gullible) individuals into parting with a pile of their hard-earned money. And you know what? It occasionally works!
Why anyone would fall for such a thinly veiled scam is beyond comprehension, but every so often I hear in the news where someone has done just that, always with very expensive consequences. I guess with human nature being what it is, there will always be scammers around and just enough people who end up falling for their schemes to make their efforts worthwhile.
Phishing has apparently replaced the Ponzi scheme as the scam of choice in the Internet age, and all of those annoyingly stupid emails clogging my inbox are beginning to get just a bit tiresome. Oh well, such is life in the 21st century I suppose.
To think,, I passed up all my chances to inherit my fortune.