Pay us Fourthy Thousand Dollars in the next 96 hours for your saftey or our Nigerian assasins will snip you, gun you, and eliminate you. It is advicea
Well, it seems that the Nigerian “help us free this money” soft-sell scam is getting lower response rates these days so they have moved on to version 2 – the hard sell (article in the Register) – a direct demand for protection money with the threat of being “snipped and gunned down.” From the poor spelling throughout the document, I assume that means “sniped”, which I am sure is still not even a verb. Regardless, I always thought that fear would be a better motivator than greed in getting clueless newbies to respond to email anyway.
Given the fact that you can buy one of those CDs with ten million email addresses on it and that this email will then be spammed to all of them, I think the “assasins” (sic) will be really busy on their 50th anniversary.
From a marketing perspective, I wonder how high their response rate is? I mean, is it better than the average “help us free up the money” scam? Do you think scammers like this track their hit rate so that they know if their marketing tactics are working properly?
I’m guessing that their next version will integrate some sort of risk-free offer:
“Pay us $40,000USD imediatley or we will snip you….and if you are not completley satisfied with our protectave servaces in the first month, we will refund 10% of that fee.”
Here is the email that was quoted in the Register:
QUOTE:
Subject: TREAT AS URGENT ..Ben.. {THIS IS NO JUNK MAIL}
“EXECUTION”EXECUTION”EXECUTION”‘
NATIONAL CORPORATION HEADQUATERS LAGOS.
PRIVACY. we wish to introduce our company/ourselves as a subsidiary of INTERNATIONAL ASSASINATORS AND WORLD SECURITY ORGANISATIONS,with branches in one hundred and two {102}countires.
we have received a fax message from our headquaters,new york,this morning to inform you to produce a mandatory sum of US$40,000.00 {FOURTHY THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS} only,into our account given below in nigeria within ninety six hours{96},alternatively you will be SNIPPED and GUNNED down during the period of our oncoming anniversary of fifty years.
STANDARD TRUST BANK VICTORIA ISLAND BRANCH LAGOS A/C NO. 03681173101152 {OLAJIDE .O. WILLIAMS} NIGERIA
CAUTION.
1.you are to attach and send with immediate effect,the payment slip,confirming the payment and to enable us to reconcile with our files and deploy our men already monitoring you.
2.we will as well waste no time to carry our operations,if we discover that this contact is disclosed to any second party including the following:-
{a}police {b}relation and {c}friends
3.we guarantee your saftey locally and internationally,on the completion of this contract and will not hesitate to disclose our men in your country to you and as well render our service if needed or on request.
we seek your urgent co-operation,for it is not our wish to get you eliminated.
Note : – Your death has been paid for by someone you offended sometime ago and it will be adviceable that you co-operate with us a.s.a.p.
TOWOGBOLA .A.JOHNSON SECRETARY.