On the BBC nightly news recently there was an article about the victims of scams and phishing via the Internet which focused on one person in detail.
The article was based on a uk male, who had fallen for a common advance fee fraud, in this case a lotto scam. I was quite annoyed at how the BBC focused in on the scam being so ‘good’.
The person seemed very articulate and well spoken so was obviously not stupid, so why do they get so gullible when it comes to Internet scams? In my opinion greed. The brief shots of the house, garden and study portrayed someone who was also reasonably wealthy, over the period of the scam he ended up giving the scammers over £16,000 (uk gbp). Now in my opinion, anyone who has this sort of money lying around but gives it away so easily is being driven by one thing only, greed!
The guy at the very least was computer literate enough to get onto the internet and check / reply to emails. So he could have quite easily searched for something relating to the email, entering the subject line alone returns several results on the first page that suggest the email was a scam. Searching google for lotto scam the first result is for a site named ‘The Dutch lottery scam’ ( https://www.stopecg.org/lottery.htm )
So within literally a few minutes alarm bells should be ringing to the person. I am no way condoning the phisher, nor do I think that the victim got what he deserved, but on the other hand I cannot understand how someone with reasonable intelligence didn’t bother to spend a few minutes looking up some information before reaching for his wallet again. The site listed shows the scam originating from holland which was where the emails were from, again this information could have easily obtained.
I remember a similar article several months back, which had a similar story but this time a woman who helped out a nigerian 419 ‘cry for help’ because she felt sorry for her. Again her motives were questionable and if I remember correctly, she ended up giving away nearly a quarter of a million!
Obviously the scams are getting more ‘advanced’ and realistic. I just wonder that the type of people who have £16,000 spare lying around and choose to use it for ‘advance fees’ for their overseas lottery win strike me as being greedy and in some cases, letting money come before any simple checks they could do to prevent them getting scammed.
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