For several months, I've been showered with e-mail notifications of incalculable riches awaiting me. I stopped adding up the sudden wealth. It was well over $100 million at the last total with no end in sight.
Yachts? My own personal jet? Villa on the Riviera? A skyscraper condo in New York City? Spreading the wealth among charities and the needy? Major donations to medical facilities? A ranch of thousands of acres somewhere along Idaho's picturesque Snake River? Helping the hungry? Mega gift boxes to troops overseas? Create scholarships? Buy an island in the South Pacific?
Then the glow of good fortune was darkened by reality.
I hadn't inherited riches. I was targeted as a pigeon by variations of the notorious "Nigerian scam."
The cons lack no imagination. E-mailers purported to be GIs in Iraq who've discovered a cache of gold bullion and will share it with me for some advanced fees. Several claimed to come from highfalutin' United Nations offices that discovered my entitlement in musty old documents. Others offer to share millions of dollars in contracts in Iraq. Obscure and long-forgotten distant relatives have bequeathed millions. E-mailers' names ranged across Eastern and Western cultures.
Copies of e-mails revealing newly discovered (phony) fortunes now stuff a folder two inches thick.
A child could spot these as frauds. The first tip-off is that the cons ask for return e-mails with the recipient's name and Social Security number or other personal data they can use to mine your bank account. Then there's the semi-illiterate grammar and stilted English. Hello? This is sillier than the domestic phishing scams purporting to be from U.S. banks checking on account authenticity.
However, not so obvious to all Americans. The U.S. Secret Service and FBI report that hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost to overseas e-mail scams by Americans foolishly opening access to bank accounts or sending advance "fees" to overseas addresses to obtain fortunes they soon learn are pure fabrications.
Bernie Madoff fleeced billions from suckers with promises of impossible returns on investments. Now Madoff boasts his unprecedented fraud was possible because inept federal investigators lacked moxie to see a Ponzi scheme right under their noses.
If government investigators can't smell fraud, then daydreamers who'll fall for any oily swindle promising extravagant—and non-existent—fortunes will be hopelessly taken in.
This also probably explains why U.S. political campaigns have fallen into such coarseness and crudeness—unthinking voters who're ready to bite for any outlandish slanders.
