Nigerian Scammers

[Darendor]

I will preface this by saying I'm not a racist asshole or anything. I could not care less where someone is born on this planet.

Having said that, I've discovered a mildly amusing pastime. I go into a chatroom from time to time, and I am literally bombarded with these messages from people coming from Nigeria claiming to be a lonely woman in need of love, money, and/or my Google Hangouts ID.

Invariably I get a message that goes something like:

HELLO GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR MY NAME IS MR JENNIFER JAMES IT IS VERY NICE TO MEET YOU
CAN WE PLZ TALK ON HANGOUTS TO GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER MORE BETTER?

Now, I'm not a putz. I know that these scammers are engaging in identity theft. The idea here is that some gullible sucker (i.e. not me) will go "Hot darn, Mr Jennifer wants to go out with me, I'll do whatever they ask" and so I give them my Hangouts ID, which is then used to harvest as much data about me as possible, including IP address, and of course social engineering where I'm supposed to be a sucker enough to hand over my bank information for them to loot.

They use VPNs to disguise the fact that they're from Nigeria, so their profile thing says "Female, age 31, United States". They then proceed to ask me where I'm from, despite it clearly saying Canada.

So I started getting clever and asking them where in US they are from; they reply by saying "Alabama" (for instance). Me not being a native US citizen, I refer to a quick glance of the states of the USA and deliberately pick out a city NOT from their supposed state, and then say:

Oh so that means you must be from New Orleans, Alabama then?

(New Orleans is in Lousiana, not Alabama)

And I get a reply:

YES I AM FROM THE NEW OLREANS ALABAMAR CAN I HAVE UR HANGOUTS PLZ


And so I lead them on for a bit before calling them out on their BS. They typically then end up abusing me in Nigerian Pidgin ( ) and then blocking me.




I have no life.

[Darendor]

So this is precisely what I'm talking about.



I literally told them I was Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, originally from the planet of Coruscant. They didn't pick up on the reference, obviously. They then proceed to tell me they're from "phixona arziona City", which I can only presume is a badly mangled attempt to mean "Phoenix, Arizona, USA".

They then follow the script by asking "What are you really looking for", since they obviously believe that anyone who is male and on the Internet is looking for sex/love/God only knows what else. So I make an obscure reference to our favourite CRPG of all time, and this too goes unnoticed. Clear signs that this person is oblivious to (North) American pop culture and is, therefore, from Nigeria.

They went on to state they were looking for a sexual relationship; I said "oh, from phixona arziona City?", and they stopped responding.

[Darendor]

Oh, wait, they came back. Briefly.

Page 2 of the conversation:

[Weber G]

Nice conversation....

[Darendor]

I've had some real gems occasionally. One was saying they were a famous wrestler and asking if I've been to their page. I said that I'd never heard of them, and then they replied, "How often have you visited my page?". I said, "Gee, you really don't speak English very well do you?". They said, "Yeah I don't speak English".


It's not that they don't speak English, but it's rather the fact that they think they're being sly but in fact providing unintentional comedy with their scamming attempts.

[Darendor]

I managed to get 2 pages from this person here.

[Darendor]

And here we have "Nora", whose name is apparently Wendy.




For those of you who don't know, Toronto is located in Ontario, not Quebec.

Also, Abuja is the capital of Nigeria; they sadly didn't react to this statement.

[Darendor]

So this one I managed to string along for six pages, plus an image of North America-ish to illustrate context.

I got the usual cold-call private message. They claim to be from a place called Illinois, Alaska. This person took the names of two American states and turned one into a city to make it sound legit.

I promptly told them I was from Skara Brae, and they seem to think it was in Canada. I lead on with some nonsense claiming to enjoy the nightlife in Thessalonica, and of course it flies right over their head (they don't care about any of this stuff anyways; they're simply trying to establish a rapport with a potential swindle victim). You can read the rest of the exchange for yourself.

I included a Google Earth overlay to illustrate the relative locations of the places this scammer mentioned. As you can see, Lake Michigan is nowhere near the state of Alaska, and once I begin to call them out on their "small city of 12+ million people", they then change it to mean that the city is Alaska, which they then try to sell to me is the capital of the state of Illinois. As the image shows, Illinois barely borders Lake Michigan, and it's quite squarely in the southwest region of said lake, not the northeast as the scammer claimed. I not-so-politely inform him that the capital of Illinois is, in fact, a city called Chicago...

I finally point out to him that he's full of it and that when pretending not to be from Nigeria, it helps to at least research the place you're gonna claim to be from so not to come off as a total moron.

I mean really. Alaska is the capital of Illinois, a small city of 12.63 million people, on the northeast shore of Lake Michigan.

C'mon, man...

[Darendor]

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