I just got another one of those spams: an official of a poor African nation offers millions of dollars to some random person, out of the blue, who happens to be you:

Office of Presidency
Payment Office of Paymaster General
Accra Ghana.

Attn: Beneficiary, Approval To Your Fund Release.

It was resolved after the Board meetings 20th of January 2011 by the foreign Remittance office to release your outstanding payment of $2.5m USD waiting for transfer as we began this First Quarter fiscal payment. You are to reconfirm to us all this information below for your payment.

We sincerely apologies for our late contact with you, We are committed to serve you better.

At first, there is something almost charming about the ham-handedness of the approach, the blatant disregard for spelling and grammar and, to top it off, the apology for not having contacted me sooner about my $2.5 million windfall!

But then I ask myself: would this same spam seem so “charming” if it had been written by someone in Russia, Estonia, China or New Jersey impersonating the so-called Paymaster General of Ghana?  No, it wouldn’t.  The chuckles arise from imagining there is a genuinely unsophisticated person trying to make money this way.  The reality is, the messages come from organized crime, and the earnest attitude and misspellings are carefully calculated to elicit responses from vulnerable people.  If this didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it.

I realize this topic is old news.  What inspired me to post this is that, after all these years, the scam lives on.  This is what amazes me.  If anything, I get more “Money from Africa” spam now than ever.  Someone must be biting on it.  But who?