Scam email? Where might it have come from and anything I can do?

Email read as follows:





Dear sir/ madam





I am the auditing and accounting manager bank of Africa (B.O.A) here in Ouagadougou , Burkina Faso . In my department I discovered an abandoned sum of us$10.5m dollars (ten million five hundred thousand us dollars) in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customer (Mr Richard Burson from Florida us) who died along with his entire family in 1999 in a plane crash.





Since I got information about his death, the bank have been expecting his next of kin to come over and claim his money because we cannot release it unless some body applies for it as next of kin or relation to the deceased customer as indicated in our banking guidelines and laws.





But unfortunately we learnt that all his supposed next of kin or relation died alongside with him at the plane crash leaving nobody behind for the claim. It is therefore upon this discovery that I now decided to make this business proposal to you and release the money to you as the next of kin or relation to the deceased customer for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is coming for it and I don't want this money to go into the bank treasury as unclaimed bill.





The banking law and guideline here stipulates that if such money remained unclaimed after ten years, the money will be transferred into the bank treasury as unclaimed fund. The request of foreigner as next of kin in this business is occasioned by the fact that the customer was a foreigner and a Burkinabe cannot stand as next of kin to a foreigner. I agree that 30% of this money will be for you as a respect to the provision of a foreign account, 10% will be set aside for expenses incurred during the business and 60% would be for me.





I will send to you by fax or email the text of application form. I will not fail to bring to your notice that this transaction is hitch-free and that you should not entertain any atom of fear as all required arrangements have been made by me.





My regards to you and the family


Mr James Mustaf














I particularly hate the 'regards to you and the family bit' at the bottom. I can see why some people may actually fall for this. I have been on the bank of africa website and to the section for that particular country but can't seem to find any evidence of this man there, and it's all in french which doesn't help! Any ideas how he might have got my email? As I dont give it out much. Is there anything I can do to help stop this email being sent to someone else?

Scam email? Where might it have come from and anything I can do?
These are common scams, we all get them. You have to give them some money up front in good faith to pay for the transfer and taxes. Just spam it, it's easy for them to get our email address.
Reply:It is a scam to get your personal information and/or money.


Do not respond to it.


Report it to yahoo, so they are aware.


Forward to spam@yahoo.com or spoof@yahoo.com (If it involves a lot of money)


And for your E-mail safety, remember:


Never open E-mail unless you are absolutely sure of who sent it, treat ALL others as spam.


Never give your personal information out to anyone, be it E-mail, snail mail, phone calls or at your front door.
Reply:SCAM


They get your email from many sources. There is no way to predict when you get on their list and no way to remove yourself from the list.


Also, spam filters find it difficult to predict these scams without creating false positives for ordinary messages.





I get my revenge using thunderbird to extract the full headers with the message and send that via abuse.net to the domain the scammer asks you to replyto.





Note, the originator is either spoofed = nothing you can do, or a spambot virus = if an educational organisation is implicated, complain to the domain administrator that their network is being abused by an infected computer.