There's no escaping the scammers because they have nothing to lose

I received a really decent query in email yesterday from a man in the United Kingdom, claiming to be an executive with Mercedes-Benz, who was moving back from Germany to England and needed someone to teach his two kids English, as they were educated in German. The letter is really well put together, and it makes several small appeals to pathos that aren't so blatant, almost so that his story is believable. What caused me to become suspicious was that he was willing to pay $5000/month, and it got me to start wondering why he targeted me in the first place, even though he stated that he found me through a job site on where I HAD placed a resume/cv. He even mentioned it as a CV, which it was rather than a resume.

So, being a bit suspicious, but quite intrigued, I tried to research his name. Nothing really came up. Then I tried researching a couple of other things that appeared as information in his email, and still nothing came up. It was managing to look legit. Then I found one other piece of information that didn't add up completely (although it was a pretty vague piece of information...I thank my detective skills for this one). I then did a couple of advanced searches, and then it all came to light. This guy has been running this scam for years. He gets you interested, and then at the end part of the process, he gets you to reveal your credit card information (to supposedly pay your ticket or something like that), and then wipes out your money. Some of the variations on it manage to wipe out the entire savings of people.

So, this got me to wondering. Why do people do this? Sure, I understand there are some crapwad confidence people out there, but I seem to be finding this happening way too often lately. We all know about the Nigerian scams (my god, if I get another email about some minister in the Nigerian government who has embezzled millions of dollars he wants to deposit into one of my accounts or GIs in Iraq who need my help in sneaking hundreds of millions of dollars of stolen Saddam Hussein riches, I'm going to blow a gasket), but this is starting to seem completely out of control.

Why aren't our governments doing something about this? Turning it over to local law enforcement doesn't do anything. They don't have jurisdiction, and even when they do, they don't see it as a "real" crime. The FBI doesn't care. Hell, there's a huge scam going on where they're using the Director of the FBI as the one scamming you. These thieves don't care, and they don't feel they're accountable to anyone.

I say we kill them. All of them. Yeah, that sounds a bit extreme, but make it so no government prosecutes you if you hunt these guys down and kill them. Hell, I might take a few weekends and do just that. It would be so nice to see these people realize there might be ramifications for their actions, but right now there are none. They laugh at us and then bleed some naive person's bank account dry. I mean, I'm completely aware that they're doing this sort of thing, and I almost got drawn into one of their schemes (although I would never have given my account information, but who knows how that would have played out).

Stumble It!