I am barrister prince ugo a solicitor at law. I am the personal attorney to Mr Martin,a national of your country, who used to work with shell development company in Nigeria and as well a one time secret agent in transferring of money overseas Before his death On the 21st of April 2007 {my client, his wife and their three children were involved in a car accident along Badagry Express Road in which all occupants of the motor died}.
My client deposited the sum of ($36 Million) in a one of our local Bank here in Nigeria for himself, with the hope of transferring it to his country as soon as he is on leave. Since his death I have made several inquiries to your embassy to locate any of my clients extended relatives this has also proved unsuccessful.
Etc…etc…
This is the start of a pretty standard Nigerian scam email, designed to get you to part with your hard earned money. But who would really be that naive to fall for a classic Nigerian scam, especially now-a-days with the internet and such a wide publicity about the scam?
Well, it seems these types of emails are effective, according to Microsoft research division, who have released a whitepaper about the email scams.
The logic is this, when you want to sucker some poor sap in to parting with their money, you need to make sure they aren’t too smart. In fact the dumper the sap is the better, and the more likely the “Nigerian Prince” is going to get his payday. By making the original email approach really ‘terrible’ you ensure that the only sap that would be crazy enough to reply would be stupid enough t rip off. The poor email approach becomes its own filter, filtering out anyone who has any clue what so ever and leaving you with the true saps of this world.
FBI
Once you have your email written, send it out to millions of people, and wait for that 1% of people who are so gullible that they will respond pleading to help out the poor Nigerian Prince.
Of course if they were gullible enough to hand over money to the Prince in the first place, you will want to follow up with an official email from the FBI, offering to retrieve your stolen money that the Prince has run off with. Another pay day.
It seems the old adage;
a fool and his money are easily parted
has never been more true.