Below The Beltway

That was the title of an email that showed up in my inbox this morning. It appears to be yet another variation on the Nigerian scam that has been floating around the net for years now. This one is different, though, in that it now purports to be from someone at the “Central Bank of Nigeria” who found out about a Nigerian-like scam and wants your help in stopping it.

Full text below:

Dear Good Friend

After a serious thought, I decided to reach you directly and personally because I do not have anything against you, but your Nigerian partners.

I am the director of wire transfer/telex department of the central bank of Nigeria, some time in the past your Nigerian partners approached me through a friend of mine who works with one of the ministries here and requested that I assist them conclude a money transfer deal and we all agreed.

According to them, they wanted to use this strategy to transfer a huge amount of us dollars which they accumulated through inflated contract awards and the money has been floating in the (c.b.n) since the original beneficiary has been fully paid, so they wanted to use your account to transfer the surplus out of Nigeria. We agreed that once i do this, they would give me US$100,000.00 and give me another us100, 000.00 when i released the fund to your account. When they saw that I have done that and your name has been approved among the list of those to be paid, instead of giving me the agreed deposit of US $100,000.00,they started avoiding me and resorted to threats.

I immediately deleted the transfer code of the fund, which is only known to me because of my position, and release other contractors fund without yours. They became angry the more when they saw that their threat did not work, and started bribing other officials to get another approval to transfer the money to you without success. Approvals are free, is it not funny that a beneficiary is being asked to pay for approval while his millions is here with us? I am 100% responsible for the delay and obstructions because of their breach of contract. if you doubt what i have just told you, pay any amount they will ask you to pay now, after a short time they will come up with another reason to pay again and it goes on and on. Now if you want us to work together, these are my conditions.

i. I will have 50% of the money because it is only the two of us left fornow. ii. You will assist my son to open an account in your country or any other place of my choice where I will pay in my own share. iii as you have seen, it will be useless and mere waste of money if you continue with any other person, so we will conclude the transaction with utmost secrecy with the above telephone and fax number.

if these conditions are acceptable to you, contact me as soon as possible to let us finalize so that I will send to you our official KTT wire transfer form to complete and I will release the money to your account. But if you are not interested, I advice you to forget the fund as it will be transferred into our consolidated national reserve.

Best Regards.

Mallam Yusuf
Director, Wire Transfer/Telex Dept. (CBN)

Its hard to believe people actually fall for this stuff.