Too smart for a scam, or not?
4 April 2016(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 4 April 2016 issue)
Dear Kam,
I received an email from a Nigerian general’s son telling me that he’ll give me huge amounts of money and all I have to do is send a bit of money first. This sounds great because, well, I’ve always wanted to have huge amounts of money. Obviously I’d spend the money within the Malaysian economy in, say, Malaysian restaurants in Melbourne and London.
Scammed
I’ve always told myself I would never fall for a scam. I’m just too smart for that. Aren’t I? Many years ago I was standing outside an office in Kampung Pandan when a man came up to me and said, “You have a lucky face”. I asked him if this was going to cost me any money and he assured me it wouldn’t. He proceeded to tell me my future and that there was a woman in my life. Sadly, this was completely not true at the time so he quickly said that there would be a woman in my life in the future, which cheered me up. He wrote something on a piece of paper and crushed it in his hand and then he asked me to name my favourite flower. I said, “Are you familiar with the flower of the frangipani tree?” He asked me to name another and we went through several (African Tulip, Rafflesia and so on) until he finally lost patience and asked me if liked the rose. I said it’s OK. He then uncrumpled the piece of paper and showed me that he had written “Rose”. I was amazed. For all this remarkable information I managed to bargain him down from RM200 to RM50. Several years later, I was walking through London and a man came up to me and said, “You have a lucky face” and I said, “Haven’t we met before?”
A friend of mine got a message from a distant relative in India asking for some advice. The relative in India had received an email saying that he had been given a job to work in Kuala Lumpur’s Carcosa Seri Negara Hotel. He would be paid US$2,000 a month and all he had to do was send a whole bunch of money to process some official paperwork. My friend’s relative wanted to know if this incredible job offer was legitimate. There was no address on the email (not even the address of Carcosa) but there was a Malaysian handphone number. So my friend called the number and asked to book a room at Carcosa. The voice on the other end (which my friend guessed was definitely not Malaysian) sounded very flustered. There were some heated exchanges on the other end and then the line went dead. It seems there were no rooms available at Carcosa, which is hardly surprising because it has closed down. My friend informed his relative that it was a scam.
Another friend received an email about an orphanage in Nigeria that needed lots of money. It was a tragic story of destitution and misery that started with “Hello Hi!” My friend was bored that day so she wrote back to say that she was moved by the story and wanted more information before sending any money. She also started to tell about her own “tragic” circumstances and asked them for money. Emails were exchanged until the orphanage realised that they were being trolled and gave up.
Clearly these are scams, often called “419 scams” after the section in the Nigerian criminal code dealing with fraud, and it’s hard to believe that anybody would ever fall for them but people do. I heard an interview with a British man who had been told completely out of the blue that he had inherited a Nigerian oil company and he paid £325,000 for the official paperwork. He fell for the scam for a number of reasons. He worked in the oil industry and thought it possible that somebody might leave him an oil company, because, you know, that’s what people do. Also, he went to Nigeria to determine if the whole thing was legitimate. He was greeted at the airport by police outriders who whisked him away to meet the minister for oil, who must have been the minister for oil because he sat in an office that said “Minister for Oil”. So the British man paid £325,000, but I got the impression he could afford it.
But surely not all unsolicited contacts are scams. Perhaps the Nigerian orphanage was legitimate and my friend had denied some children a chance for a better future. And if you ever receive a letter from an Arabian prince offering you huge amounts of money then it might be a good idea to send a polite reply.
Reprinted with the kind permission of
