Craigslist Scams
Scams Continued......
The lottery Scam (One version):
How many of you saw the movie "Matchstick Men"? I thought that was a
sad but hilarious movie. It was a con man's movie and it showed a
few good cons. In the end the biggest con man (Nicolas Cage) gets conned
himself. One of the cons in the movie is the Lottery con. This works
also over the internet, but here is how the movie did it. In the
movie, the lead girl (the character was around 15 years
old) stands outside a liquor store I believe and starts sizing up
her mark. She starts crying and some nice older lady comes to console
her. She then explains how she has a lottery ticket but she can't
cash it because she (insert your favorite sob story here) is either
a run away, or doesn't want all her money to be taken by her step
dad, or doesn't want her boyfriend who beats her up to get the
money. You get the idea. So she convinces the older Lady that the
ticket is worth $1,000 and she will sell it to her for $100. (I have
diverted from the movie just to make my examples easier). So the
greed of this lady takes over. She conveniently walks
over to the ATM takes out $100 and gives it to the girl. Easy money
for the girl since the Lottery ticket is bogus. There are many
variations on this depending how much money and how complicated you
want to get. You can buy a real ticket and alter it, or you can have
a phony newspaper printed up with winning numbers for a ticket you
already own, or you could have the liquor store clerk be in on it,
and on and on. It depends how much money is at stake, how far you go
with the con. This is also a popular Nigerian scam over the
internet. I'm sure many of you have gotten those in your emails. Ask
yourself if for every 10,000 emails that get ignored if only one
takes the bait did the scammer loose anything? Nope! All this stuff
is fully automated so the computer is doing all the work and the
scammer sits back and takes the money from the fools who answer the
emails.
The emails tell you that you have won 10,000,000 from the "El
Gordo Grande Spanish Lottery" or some other made up lottery, or
sometimes real lottery names are used. The UK lotteries are popular.
Usually foreign countries are used since they are harder to
corroborate. You were the lucky one (but you never even entered the
lottery) and you were randomly selected and have won this great
amount of money. All you have to do is send them a check for $10,000
to cover the licensing costs, transfer fees, excise fees,
inheritance fees, sales taxes, and any other BS fees they can come
up with. If you are greedy and stupid enough to send them the money,
they just made a killing off of you because YOU ARE A SUCKER!
I know none of you, my loyal readers would ever be dumb enough to
fall for something as obviously scammy as that. That's why I'm here
folks. To help you and HURT them!
