Throwing the bait

Naturally I've sent the e-mail from one of my accounts I usually use in a situation when I don't want to give my proper e-mail address for any reasons. This is how it goes:

To:barwinyama@yahoo.co.uk
When:29 April 2011 01:07:02


Hi I received your e-mail concerning death of my relative in which you ask to contact you as soon as possible. I'm very excited about getting so much money, but first I need to be sure it's not a scam, can you please provide your detailed information including your physical address.

Thanks!
-Pord

My bait is written in a way to give William opportunity to calm the concerned person down, the hooks are there for him to start making me sure he is not a scam artist, so he replies with quite detailed message which looks like a template with some additional details. Notice however that the level of English becomes quite inconsistent in his reply:

Re: Urgent reply.
Williams Inyama <barwinyama@yahoo.co.uk;
Кому:***@qip.ru
Когда:29 Апрель 2011 13:19:01


Dear Pord,
Thanks for your reply noted.

You are supposed to be excited because you have not come accross such money before and firstly I want to assure you that it is not a scam.

I really know that you are not the next of kin but since I have searched a long time now and could not get the relations,I decided to contact you,understanding that you can stand as the next of kin to receive this funds from the bank since you are sharing same surname with my late client.And the reasons why you have to stand as the next of kin to help matters is that the bank gave me a deathline till end of next month to produce the relatives or have the account declared unservicable thereby blocking the account and that means the bank seating on the funds hence my contact to you.I need your assistance so that upon transfering same to your account I will fly to meet you and we share the money for ourselves.40% to you and 50% for and we leave 10% ear-marked in case of any unforeseen expenses in the cause of the transfer to your account.And part of it will be donated to the ophanage.

Therefore,I request you to send me your datas such as your full name and addresses,telephone and fax numbers,your age and occupation .This information will help me to prepare an application which I will send to you and you forward it to the bank to enable the bank to start processing the transfer to your bank account.

My complete information is as follows:

Barrister Williams Inyama ESQ.
Diamond Chambers.
Age:52 years.
Office Address:32 Rue Aniko Palako.
Tel: +228 0942008 .
Fax; +228 2215799.
Lome Togo.
Home Address:No 12 Rue de Kamina
Koketime,Lome Togo.

I count on your cooperation.

Best regards,
Barr Williams Inyama.

At this point he already exposed himself as a scam artist since he responded to a random message which didn't specify my surname, but his reply refers to this surname as if it was known. He provides the address which I never bothered checking out, the following e-mails made it unnecessary. All he wants is my address and personal details he affectionately calls "datas"

Throwing more bait

After receiving the first e-mail from William, it was clear who he is, so I started slowly to develop an act for myself too, my next e-mail evolves into a joke slowly, I try to see is there a limit for my counterpart to patiently ask for precious "datas". I also tried to write longer message so he spends more time reading it. I had no story line at that time, pure improvisation:

Hi William,

My head spins from all the numbers hanging in the air. I'm very excited and eager to go ahead with the deal. 40% sounds like a lot of money! But I need first to do all the accounting and the budgeting before I can proceed with your requests. You see I'm worried my personal information may get exposed to the people who can use it for their benefit, and since I have substantial funds in my account, I have to make sure I can trust people I deal with.

Firstly I would like to know what is the name of the bank which holds the funds, secondly I would like please to verify the surname if it really matches mine, since sometimes I know because my surname transliteration from Rumanian differs a lot in different countries, I'm worried that once I have all my data presented to you and you submit the request to the bank they will refuse only because couple of letters won't match. Please kindly pass me the name exactly as it appears on the bank account.

-Pord

Note how I mention I have some money, I want him to think there is going to be more than one possibilities to scam me. At this point I'm not completely sure what exactly he wants from me, just my address, or he wants to lure me into paying some money upfront for non-existing banking operation costs. Here is what I got back:

Dear sir,


I quit understand your position and carefulness over releasing your personal information, please understand that I do not request for your bank information and I should not for what so ever, obviously your bank particulars will be required to complete this transfer but it is only the bank that will request for this information after you must have completed inheritance release process.


Contacting you is as a result of my several unsuccessful attempts to locate any relative of my late client as I told you in my previous email and as the attorney to the deceased. The bank is counting on my recommendation on the supposed next of kin to the deceased ,meaning I will not have any problem presenting you to the bank and I also have in my possession all the needed documents that the bank might ask from you to make sure you are the right person which I will gladly hand over to you when such document are required.


But the most important thing here is to build the foundation of this partnership with trust though,I can not at this point expect you to trust me %100 without knowing me very well but you can not stand a chance of knowing me without dealing me so we are stocked here. So is up to you to decide what to do.


I have gone too far by providing you with my address and other relevant information about me but one thing I can not give you now without knowing if you are working with me or not is the name of the bank where the money is deposited. The name of my deceased client is Victor Yanovskaya.This is the name the account is bearing.But we calls him generally Victor Kanovskaya when he was alife.Hope it is just okay since it does not affect his account .


That is the only information I will give to you for now until you let me know your position.

You can see how he swallows the bait, he has to give up the imaginary surname, which is of course one of the template names. I'm not sure why he used this one, probably because I used an email account in .ru domain. In any case, note how paragraphs are different in a way they are written. It's easy to distinguish templates from the parts of reply William  had to write himself.

The fun begins

So it was time to start the game. With enough information received I was able to fill my replies with nonsense and jokes. My goal was to firstly make William spend time on reading replies, secondly keep his hope alive, and thirdly receive a piece of evidence he's doing a scam. I'm not sure if you familiar with Australian comedian Santo Cilauro. If you've never heard about him or Molvania, you should google his name. In short he came up with imaginary country of Molvania situated in Eastern Europe, he also applied to perform on Eurovision contest with very funny 80's synthpop/high energy parody. His humor is subtler and funnier (to me) than one of Borat character.

William,

I'm glad to receive such detailed e-mail from you. You are right, in our times it's very hard to trust people around you. Everyone tries to exploit our weaknesses, so we have to be careful. I'm not even sure if sending my personal information by e-mail is safe, because there are many articles on the web about frauds and scams, and they all urge not to provide such information to strangers. But you are right by saying it's impossible to know you without actually dealing with you, and the prize is so big and compelling I'm really torn apart and don't know what to do!

I'm probably going to seek a little bit more assurance about your credentials, I got your address and everything else, but I also would like to receive your registration number. I talked to my friend who is lawyer in my home country Molvania, and he said he had to get registered with Molvania's Law Society before he could open the practice. But he's not dealing with banks or anything, he is in real estate law. He told me once one of his clients sent his home address to a stranger and his house was later repossessed by the bank in which he took out the mortgage, because somebody  took loan against his property and didn't pay.

I want to trust you so much, because we are talking about a lot of money, and you come forward as a very intelligent guy, and I believe you will be able to do the job right, but deep inside I'm still hesitant. You see I have this big nice house on the shore and I wouldn't want to lose it because of my greed. My friend urged me to ask you to provide your legal registration number, he told me that should remove my last concern. I don't know about Togo, but in Molvania every lawyer has a registration number and a nice wooden stamp with it, so he can certify the documents. My friend showed it to me once, and I'm still jealous I don't have one myself!

Sincerely,
Pord Yanovsky

It was interesting to me if the guy can catch the artificial country in my message, apparently he wasn't interested  to look it up. His reply was insisting on "datas", but not on banking information. The answer was quite long, but the level of English degrades significantly. To the point it's actually hard to understand what was meant to be said.

Dear Pord,

Thanks for your mail and for your bit understanding.

You see,we are in the world where if we cannot have trust and faith we are bound of not archieving anything.If there is no existence of trust within us,the transaction we are about to commence can never work out.Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen and by faith we shall complete this transaction smoothly and begin to enjoy the friut of our labour.

I am a senior advocate in Lome Togo and you must be aware that what you asked me to give you is a very vital classified document which we,the lawyers dont release anyhow as it is against our ethics.We may release the whole world but cannot tamper with our law certificates.

Gentleman,if actually you are free in mind as I am free in mind,having a good thought  towards you that in the process of this transaction we shall meet one on one,then you will have no cause to hesitate in coming up with my request so that we may kick off this transaction.I only requested for your data excluding your bank account information to help me prepare an application which I will send back to you and you will be the one to forward it to the bank as the next of kin and the bank then contract you to proceed on the processing of the release of the funds via your bank account.It is the bank that has the right to demand  for your bank account informations and any other vital document or information deemed necessary for the transfer of the funds to your bank account.

For your information,the bank gave me a deathline which is fast approaching,that time when if I did not bring the relatives of my late client,they will declare the account unservicable thereby confiscating it,so the earlier we put this application the better for us.

Waiting to hear from and to have the required datas as to proceed.I will rather send you my international passport but that will be on Monday when my scanner might have be well repared.

Have a nice weekend.

Best regards,

Barrister Williams Inyama.

I highlighted couple of very interesting mistakes, *deathline* definitely being the funniest of them. It's a beautiful mix of cliches and broken English that makes a reply so much enjoyable to read. But the biggest surprise was not the reply. In a separate e-mail William sent me something I hoped to get, but wasn't expecting so soon:

Dear Pord,

Attached herewith is my International passport copy.

Send your datas to me and I shall prepare the application and send to you so that you may forward it to the bank directly by yourself.

Best regards,

Barr William Inyama.

Tel: +228 0942008 .

This picture is worth more than words. The scan is blatantly forged. I think in our day and age it's very audacious to assume people will actually believe in something like that. The serial number of the passport is real, so it's actually possible to find out who is the original owner of the document. But that's another story for another time.

The farce

When I received the fake passport copy I didn't have to pretend anymore so I was able to simply fool around without any particular purpose, just waiting when exactly my counterpart will grow tired of nonsense. It would take some time but back than he was still hopeful to receive "datas".

William,

I received the scan of your passport, thank you very much! You look like a very trustworthy person. I have less and less doubts about the deal, and can't believe I was so lucky you chose me from so many people to get all this money. I talked to my lawyer friend and he told he will run the scan you just sent with his buddies in customs, he told me they have a very smart computer which can scan all passports in the world. He also told me that lawyers usually have a separate database, so it's easier to find their passports! You don't have to send me your registration number anymore.

Unfortunately my friend appears to be a little bit greedy, I thought he will help me free of charge, but he demands a cut in this deal. He actually told me that you taking 50% is substantially more than usual. So he says that he wants 10% of the deal, and it should come from your side. Meaning, 40% me, 40% you, 10% him, 10% earmark. I was furious at the beginning, but later I understood, that some people are too jealous of someone else luck,  the problem is my friend knows too much, and he threatened me he can pull some strings in Molvania police if needed. I guess that's the price to pay for being a good friend. Anyways, he's going to check your passport with customs very soon. I'm, sure it's going to be OK, and we will be able to proceed! I'm burning with anticipation.

Another not so good news, I asked my bank about what they usually do when somebody deposits money on my account. They asked why am I asking, I said no reason, just out of interest, they told me than that if it's coming from unknown source from abroad they will run a check if the money was not stolen. Than they told me my file was marked, and they will investigate every transaction for the next two years. I really hope your bank is very big, mine is the biggest in Molvania, maybe even in the world.

I have all my data written already and saved on my computer, as soon as my friend calls me, I'll send it to you!

Thanks!

Pord Yanukovsky

My guess is that the scam artists are not prepared for such long correspondence because the language was broken more than usual on the reply I got. I was interested if William will get worried about me showing the phony passport scan, and he was indeed worried, he still was under impression I'm going to send him "datas"

Dear sir
My passport are not given to you for exposition because you have to understand that your exposure of this transaction may raise an eyebrow or suspicion.this kind of transaction must be treated with care and confidentiality.

As you gave them my passport,they may out jealousy tell you anything that may get you off the deal because they may not want you to enjoy such funds into your account.

I strongly advice that you visit here so that we may go together to the bank and you sign all the transfer papers afte the processing of the transfer,this will infact remove all your doubts because.If you really want to carryout this transaction with me,you have to send me all required datas to start now or I have to make further contacts to search a capable hand to commence this transaction because the bank gave me the end of this month or confiscate the account which automatically puts me to a loss end.

Waiting the datas urgently.

Regards,
Barr Williams Inyama

Funny how the reasoning is still there, William is trying hard to get the information, but he starts to get impatient. Further exchange will reveal more impatience, the replies will get shorter too.