A New Approach To Scams

Our brave fighting scam artists question a person of interest.


In the process of cleaning the Talking Points Memo spam out of my e-mail account, I ran across this little gem:

From: CAPTAIN JOHN ENGLAND <xxxxxx@btinternet.com.invalid>
To: undisclosed recipients@null, null@null
Subject: GET BACK TO ME
Date: Mar 22, 2010 4:46 AM
Attn;

I am Captain John England from the hospitality state (Mississippi), of the US Marine Force on Monitoring and Peace –keeping mission in Baghdad-Iraq.On the 21st day of December 2009, we were alerted on the sudden presence of some Terrorists camping in a suburb not too far from Karbala here in Iraq. After Immediate intervention, we captured three (3) of the Terrorists, twenty-six (26) were killed leaving seven (7) injured.

In the process of torture they confessed being rebels for late Ayman al-Zawahiri and took us to a cave in Karbala which served as their camp. Here we recovered several guns, bombs and other Ammunitions including some boxes among which two contains nuclear weapons, one filled with hard drugs(cocaine) and the other four to my amazement contain some US Dollars amounting to $23.2M after I and two of my junior intelligent officers counted them.

I however instructed them to keep this in high secrecy.

I am in keen need of a “Reliable and Trustworthy” person like you who would receive, secure and protect these boxes containing the US Dollars for me up on till my assignment elapses in here in Iraq..

I assure and I promise to give you 15% of this fund, however feel free to negotiate what you wish to have as your percentage in this business.

Please assure me of your keeping this topmost secret to protect my job with the US Monitoring and Peace-Keeping mission.

Please for the confidentiality of this deal due contact me via this private email address (xxxxx@gmail.com.invalid)

Kind Regards,

Captain John England.

I especially like the closing, "Kind Regards", from someone who supposedly tortured the location of some money that he's decided to keep for himself. The "Hospitality State" thing is a nice touch, too.

Of course, this is another bogus Nigerian bank scheme, but it's hard to believe that a few years ago people would have dared mention torture in such an e-mail. In the past, that wasn't a good way to instill trust in people. Now, it would appear, it is.

I guess it's one more sign of the decline of our civilization.

It's nearly certain that this was not written by anyone in the U.S. military, incidentally. I've spent a long time among them, and this letter doesn't use any of the terms or phraseology I'm used to hearing from them.