This week at work the most ridiculous thing happened, the type of thing that I am fully aware exists but I don't know anyone that it's happened to [at least not that I know of].
...Someone at my job was bamboozled by a nigerian scam!!!
:: pause ::
we all know about these scams ... my personal favorite is the amazing apartment that is available for rent insanely cheap and all you need to do is wire $4k to somewhere in africa and wait for the magical key to be mailed to you ... well this one was slightly different and involved an online dating service [none of the popular ones]
now ... it is 2010. the internet is what it's all about. i personally have nothing against online dating but you have to be careful. shit, you have to be careful even if you meet someone the more traditional way. there are crazy people in the world and you never know who you may be dealing with. you have to be savvy, you have to be smart, you have to not be gullible.
this man, unfortunately, was none of those things. middle-aged and having recently come out of a divorce, he is undoubtedly lonely and looking to meet someone new. enter this dating site [mate1 or something like that]. he registers, creates a profile and lo and behold, some young pretty thing contacts him.
eyebrow raise #1: he is not a sexy middle-aged man. he is not harrison ford or sean connery when they were 50. he's a regular ass dude.
anyway ... so pretty young thing contacts him and starts chatting him up via email and IM. my love this, my king that, i can't wait to be with you, blah blah blah. s[he] was laying it on thick and this man was just soaking it all up.
now i can't go on without being totally honest and admitting that this became my entertainment at work. the victim never personally told me any of this, but he would divulge all details to a coworker im pretty close to. hearing the stories and finding out what she wrote became pure comedic relief to my coworker and i. that is, until, i find out that she "needed money" for God knows what.
when i heard that, my little "people suck" radar went through the roof and i start bombarding my coworker with questions ... what is her name, how old is she, where is she? men have terrible memories so all he could remember was "ohio", "young" and "blonde".
thanks ... i pride myself on my detective skills but i wasn't going to get anywhere with that. it wasn't until days later that he was finally able to remember where this "lady" was located ... n-i-g-e-r-i-a.
womp.womp. he knew her "name" by now too and we started to frantically google away. what we found was just sad .. a forum full of thousands of threads, all related to this type of thing ... "hi i met susie q on xyz.com, she lives in nigeria and she needs money to pay her hotel bill/get airfare/pay for her sick mothers medicine...what do i do?"
sigh
then i find out that he already sent her some money. followed by her sending him some fake ass itinerary with her flight info to NY
eyebrow raise #2: who in their right mind gets on a plane to visit some person they just met 2 weeks prior? no one. unless you're crazy!
then i find out he had sent her MORE money. by then i couldn't take it anymore; this man is annoying and i don't particularly like him, but i couldn't just stand there and let this happen. so i came home, found cases on this forum that sounded exactly like his mystery lady, copied and pasted and sent them to my coworker who was the ear to all of these stories. then i forced him to show this stuff to the man and he did.
he apparently called AA and found out that she was NOT on the flight [gasp]. do you know what happened next? the girl contacted him with some sob story about how customs wouldn't let her out of the country and that she needs him to send 15% of $40k to "help her out" ... that is $6000!!!!
i don't know what happened with that but i'm thankful that i did my good deed for the month and managed to get this info to him before "her" bs lie [lets face it, this nigerian person is not a pretty blonde thing, it's some man] and before he sent them any more money!!! he didn't lose out that much, less than $1000 from what i know, but still!
people are horrible. be savvy kids! the minute someone asks you for money, run! use google, it's your friend! and if you don't know how to find info on someone, just ask me! i lloovvee googling people and finding out everything i can about them!
just call me nancy drew. :: cheese ::
No comments:
Post a Comment