Scams Through the Mail - USA

The checks are in the mail - but he doesn't want them

By Russ Lemmon (Contact)

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Peek inside Jim Nugent's den and the first thing you notice is memorabilia from the White House administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He knew them both on a first-name basis.
Take a longer look and you'll see a big pile of letters on the floor.

They are letters he has accumulated during the past year. They are not from family, friends and former colleagues, but from schemers and swindlers around the globe.
As of Thursday, the count was 1,364.
"They are from London, Australia, Singapore, Madrid, Nigeria, the Cayman Islands — you name it," he said. "I'm sick and tired of this."

The letter writers usually ask him to send money ($775, citing a recent example in a letter from Jamaica), and in return he will receive a very large amount ($4 million, the Jamaican letter promised).

Ed Moffitt, who works in the Orlando office of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, says the level of susceptibility among seniors may be tied to their financial situation.
Advance-fee fraud victims ignore the applicable adage — "if it's too good to be true, it probably is" — and may view the promised money as "a godsend," Moffitt said.

Nugent says authorities told him a woman in southwest Florida has lost nearly $100,000 in advance-fee scams, and a man in southeast Florida is out more than $40,000.

(Abridged)
SOURCE: tcPalm
-------------------------------
Scams via normal postal service or email; is the same in most countries. I have received such scam-mails, always block and bounced the mail back to the sender. Or, I log on to my ISP and report such mails as SPAM. Regarding postal scam-mails; I just threw them in the bin. Let me echo: "If it's too good to be true, it is NOT genuine!".


More Recent Posts