Papa, I’m A Millionaire

When I checked my In box this morning I was elated.

I have made a new friend.

His name is George Ihie and he is from Burkina Faso.

Until this morning I wasn’t quite sure where Burkina Faso was. I suspected it was in Africa but wasn’t sure where. Now I know it is a landlocked country in Western Africa that used to be under French rule. Its economy is based on agriculture, largely at subsistence level.

Thanks to my new friend I got a much needed geography lesson.

But wait, there’s more.

I’m going to be a millionaire.

George said so in his email –

Dear Friend,
I’m Mr.GEORGE IHIE , an accountant in a financial institution here in BURKINA FASO . I am the head of the accounts department. I am pleased to get across to you for a very urgent and profitable business proposal which I believe will profit the both of us after completion. I contacted you after a careful thought that you might be capable of handling this business transaction, which i explained below.

The sum of US$10,500,000.00 has been floating as unclaimed fund since 2003 here in the bank, as all efforts to get across to the relatives of our client who deposited the money proved abortive. Our foreign customer who died in the charter plane which crashed with his family in Central England in the year 2003.
All attempts to trace his next of kin were fruitless. My position here at my office requiries me to investigate and I therefore made further investigations and discovered that Our foreign customer did not declare any next of kin or relation in all his official documents, including his bank deposit paperwork in my bank.
According to the Bank inheritance’s Law, the money will revert to the ownership of the Burkina Faso government if nobody applies to claim the fund. To avoid this money being sent to the Central Bank treasury as unclaimed funds, I have decided to seek your assistance to have you stand as his next of kin so that the said fund ($10.5m) would be released in your name as the next of kin and paid into your account.
All documents and proof that will have you claim! this fund without stress will be forwarded to you upon your response to this mail more so, i want to inform you that i have unanimously agreed to offer you (39%) of the total sum for the assistance and role you are going to play in this transaction,(11%) will be used to establish a charity organization in your country with your supervision while the remaining will be for me and my other loyal colleagues here.
I assure you that this excercise will be carried out legally through your cooperation. I will be hoping you will give this a thoughtful consideration as i will be looking forward to reading from you urgently to enable us proceed with this transaction.
Please reply to my alternative email box george.ihie1@live.fr
Hope to read from you soonest
Best regards,
GEORGE IHIE

So just by depositing the unclaimed money into my account I get 39% of 10.5 mill? That’s around 4.1 million. Easy money. Party at my house for the next ten years!!!!!!

You and I both know this is a scam but these people didn’t and neither did this one.

The tendency to fall for it is so prevalent that there is even an excellent blog attempting to protect people from it.

I wonder how many people fall for scams like these on a regular basis. It is an alarming thought.

27 thoughts on “Papa, I’m A Millionaire”

  1. There’s an old saying that, if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.

    The one that cracks me up is the one that promises me a degree WITHOUT STUDYING. So, I did all that spare-time work, and took a sabbatical from the Air Force when I didn’t need to?

    Big problem is, there are one or two honest people in West Africa. I met someone who has a really uphill job doing PR out there … as soon as he mentions ‘Nigeria’, the shutters come down faster than the Post Office at closing time.

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  2. But he sent me that email also. He said I was being investigated and found to be the perfect person to get his millions that have been sitting there since someone died. I think he lied.
    darnit

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  3. It’s easy enough for us to laugh at these scams, but for the most part I think we forget that there are people who get taken in by them, just like the door to door scammers that prey on old ladies.

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  4. Oh dear…I thought I was fairly gullible but seriously…could it sound any more bogus?

    I never seem to get those kinds of emails only ones promising me a larger penis or how to make my woman scream with intense pleasure. Not much use to me since I don’t have a penis nor do I want a woman screaming for any reason because of me (unless it’s Josh Holloway’s wife and she’s screaming because Josh has run off with me). I’m not really sure why I even shared that little nugget except I am feeling a bit emotional after that last post and am not feeling myself. Sorry for lowering the tone of your blog Selma 😦

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  5. Oh yes, I get these too. Some of them are so amusingly worded that they are worth reading. But it is hard to believe that people might fall for them.

    Unlike Gypsy I also get the penis enhancement ones – they make me laugh too. Presumably some people must go for what they offer or they wouldn’t bother to send them?

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  6. Apparently I am rich, need an penile enhancement (I need moer than an enhancement since I don’t have one) — then they will make me a deal on cheap drugs…

    There is a bank here with the slogan “You’re richer than you think…” wonder if they have accounts in Burkina Faso, probably safer than mortgages in the U.S.

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  7. Those scam-artists never give up, do they? Like Vic, I, too, think of those who are so naive as to fall for such rubbish. However, for all of about ten seconds or so, I know what it feels like to be an actual millionaire! Sometime during the fall of 1993 my husband, now deceased, came into my studio. We had all six numbers! Then, I heard, ‘uh-oh, or something like that. Those six numbers were the numbers he had played the previous drawing!There were two winners sharing six million dollars. Had he played the same numbers he had the week before, we would have been two million dollars rich.

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  8. I used to get those from Nigeria. Lots of friends of mine in Africa. Lots of scams running. My sympathies to the poor souls who got scammed.

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  9. I’m so glad that I have NOT been receiving these junk emails in the recent past. My spam filter seems to be working well. So sad to realise that some people are gullible enough to be taken in by these hucksters. Good that you have brought this up Selma.

    Speaking of scams and spams….there is a new virus on the horizon that is suppose to be very damaging. Any emails that arrive with the subject: “Postcard from Hallmark” should not be opened. Apparently this one burns your hard drive big time and they haven’t found a fix for it yet.

    Haven’t these people got anything better to do? Wish I had that kind of techie-brain capability. I’d be putting it to use making oodles of money on the legit, not waiting to be dragged off to jail for causing so much harm, for so many people. And eventually, they DO get caught! Throw the book at them, I say…..

    There’s my rant, I feel so much better LOL. Hugs, G 😉

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  12. Hi Selma,
    Many people have been caught up in these things and its usually driven by one of two things, either greed (the easy buck!) or desperation.
    The really dangerous ones appear to be those that provide an initial return on your investment followed by even more grandiose claims of R.O.I. dependent on the size of your investment. This is where the greed kicks in and every asset that you’ve got is poured into the bogus scheme and suddenly, ‘Hey Presto!’, there is NO rabbit in the hat. Sadly, I’m aware of people who have lost their homes or even entire superannuation funds with these scams.

    Now, to the more important issue, penile enhancement. I am a male but have no interest in ‘enhancement’ because I believe in quality NOT quantity, at least thats MY excuse! These things remind of my days at primary school when the ‘King of The Castle’ was the lad who could pee the highest up the wall at the urinal, self-evidently a sign of GREAT ‘manhood’! I hope that I haven’t given too much away 🙂

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  13. OMG – I have had FIFTEEN of these in the last week! It drives me nuts! Not only that, but the lottery people from all over the world have my winning number!!!

    Holy crap – I have a bazillion dollars and didn’t know it!

    Blah!

    😀

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  15. Hi Selma,
    If we add your 4.1 million to texasblu’s bazillion dollars its going to be one HELL of a party! Do you think ten years will be long enough?
    By the way, you may have to buy a bigger house to fit us all in!

    Conservative estimates place SPAM at around 80+% of all the e-mails in the world so the scammers have to be working on a low percentage, high volume basis.
    I wonder if anyone has tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge lately?

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  16. TRAVELRAT – I can imagine that the honest people in West Africa (of which I’m sure there are many) must be shaking their heads over these scams. The other scams to look out for are the Work At Home ones where you pay to join whatever the company is. In my brief stint on a newspaper a while back I did a story on that. I signed up to a scheme with the company credit card to see what would happen. I didn’t get the information I was promised (guaranteeing me up to $500 dollars a day) and when I complained I found the company had vanished. Fortunately, I was able to get my money back by complaining to Clickbank who had processed the payment, but it was a huge rigmarole.

    LIBRAGIRL – you can’t trust anyone these days. LOL.

    VIC – you are right, of course, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest I am laughing at the people who fall for them. For the most part they are vulnerable, disenfranchised people who are easy targets. I think the scam I have mentioned is pretty easy to see through but there are some which seem genuine. I have read about a few of them and have thought that in a different frame of mind I might be taken in by them. The scammers can be very adept at convincing people they are authentic. That’s the scary part.

    GYPSY – you are an absolute character.LOL. I never get the penis ones. It’s not fair. Maybe if I say penis enough in my comments I’ll get the penis spam. Penis. Penis. Penis. Or as my two year old nephew says Peenee!

    RELUCTANT – is penis enhancement like breast enhancement? I shudder to think what might go wrong with something like that. Uuughh!

    NAT – oh, that is hilarious. The irony of banks in Burkina Faso being safer than those in the US. It’s horrible to think it might be true. I’d say they are definitely safer than banks in Iceland. What a mess.

    MARY – NO! You came so close to winning. I would have been tearing my hair out. You are right, we should think of those who fall for the scams. Not everyone is street wise and that’s who the scammers prey on. Sometimes it seems like a terrible world.

    ROSHAN – I feel bad for them too. I’m sure it cripples some people financially.

    GERALDINE – that virus sounds awful. I also don’t get the mindset of someone who deliberately creates a computer virus. I suppose it gives them some kind of notoriety. My hubby’s motherboard crashed at work after getting a virus. It cost him thousands to fix.

    EPIPHANY – oh, totally. Utter ratbags. I hate getting them too.

    PUNATIK – can you imagine the effort it must take to keep these scams running? Surely it would just be easier to get a job.

    CHRIS – I have heard of those poor people too. It’s such an awful thing. And I agree with you absolutely – it’s QUALITY not QUANTITY. LOL!!!

    TEXASBLU – yay for the comment. All those threats I made to WordPress must have worked. 🙂
    You too? I think it’s party time!!!!!

    CHRIS – with all that money I can buy a few houses (but not too many because I do live in the inner suburbs of Sydney and you know what prices are like). It wouldn’t surprise me if someone had tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. The Harbour Bridge’ll be next!

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  18. Another one to watch is the one alleging you had a big win on a lottery.

    Folks, as they say in Australia, you’ve got to be in it to win it. And, those lotteries I do buy tickets for … the Irish State Lottery, ‘El Gordo’, Euromillions … DON’T notify you that you’ve won; you have to check the numbers, and make a claim.

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  20. It is sad so many people are so desparate or greedy for easy money that they would fall for these scams. My grandmother used to say, “if it comes to easy then it is usually to good to be true or illegal.” I have heeded her words of wisdom.

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  22. Such a pity, but I am sure there are a lot of people who fall for this.
    My scam filter works amazingly well,but it doesn’t save me from persons on the telephone,congratulaing me,conning me,or pulling at my heart strings when I am in Switzerland

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  23. ANTHONY – a very important thing to remember. Sad but true.

    TRAVELRAT – I heard about that one. Apparently, many people have been caught out by it. How awful for them!

    MELEAH – There’d be a lot of smiling faces if they were real, wouldn’t there? I get sick of them too. My spam filter is pretty good but the one at work lets everything through. Makes for interesting reading. LOL.

    CRICKET- such wise words. Your Grandmother was right. I have found that working hard does get you ahead, instead of the easy option. I just wish I didn’t have to do it. LOL.

    ROSHAN – well, I’m am going to come and check that out right now. Sounds intriguing!

    DIAMONDS – I used to get a lot of phone calls too but they have died down lately. I think it’s due to my son answering the phone in the guise of various characters such as Darth Vader or Austin Powers. It does put telemarketers off!

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  24. subhanallah, memang udah banyak yang gila manusia ini, apa tidak ingat kepada Allah ko melakukan penyebaran virus yan bertujuan merusak jaringan otak….. pengecut.

    please you translation that, b’coz i have received the email same with the other people, I am sorry but… ood lock for you…

    thank you vaery much

    Pandeglang Banten Indonesia

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