Introduction

My father sometimes gets those letters from scam artists promising unreal inheritance from deceased relative. Sometimes he forwards those emails to me, since he's not sure if it's not real. Well, he doesn't speak English, he is not very knowledgeable about Internet use, so I see nothing wrong with him being puzzled by those e-mails mentioning his name and "millions of dollars" in the same sentence. Those are of course scams. The only purpose is to gather personal information and later sell it to people who will use it to their benefit. I usually reply to my father pointing out how exactly I know it's a scam, but one day I decided it's enough to waste my time only, I wanted to waste the time of whomever checks the e-mail address attached to such messages.

I decided to get a little scam baiting going, so I created a throwaway e-mail address and started correspondence exchange with the guy named William Inyama who previously spammed my father's e-mail with this message:

From: Williams Inyama
barwinyama@yahoo.co.uk

Dear D******ch,
I am Barr Williams Inyama,an Attorney at law,and the Personal lawyer to my late client late
Victor Davidovich, a foreigner who was a Shell Petroleum contractor.I am contacting you
to assist in repatriating his fund valued at US$18.5 Million into your account as his next of
kin.Waiting for your urgent reply.Barrister Williams Inyama ESQ.Tel:+228 094 2008

I had some fun exchanging e-mails with this guy, and I'm publishing the results for everyone to see. Enjoy the reading!

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.
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