Email Fraud and Scams

Dear Sir, I decided to contact you because of the urgency of my situation here and with this, let me introduce myself. I am Mr. Frank M. Momoh (28 yrs.), the son of the former head of the interim government of Sierra Leone, late Major General Joseph Momoh who died during the Sierra Leone civil disturbances. I am constrained to contact you because of the maltreatment I received from my uncles. They planned to take all of my father’s treasury and properties away from me since the unexpected death of my father. Meanwhile I wanted to escape to the United States but they conspired together and stole my international passport and other valuable traveling documents. But luckily for me they did not discover where I hid my father’s documents file where important documents are kept, so I decided to contact you confidentially. They have even closed all my father’s bank accounts just to put me into suffery and starvation. Now I urgently need an assistance of a reputable and trustworthy foreigner like you to help me receive and subsequently invest on my behalf the sum of US$7,000,000 which my father kept in a vault in Dakar-Senegal before his death. It therefore became very necessary and urgent that somebody in your foreign position should render a helping hand to safe-guard this fund for me in safe haven over there until my arrival in your country. It is my intention to compensate you with 10% of the total money for your assistance while 5% will be kept aside for any miscellaneous expenses incurred by both of us and balance kept for any profitable investment anywhere in overseas as you may advise me. The above piece is an excerpt from a fraudulent email that is circulating on the Internet. As email gains popularity for “keeping in touch,” it also gains popularity as a medium for fraud and scams. The idea is to make the recipient feel sorry for the sender and agree to help by giving up their bank account information. I propose that email is simply a new medium for an old technology. Writing has been an integral part of Western culture for centuries. To understand the criticism that new technologies face, we must go back to the time of Socrates, the great Greek philosopher. At this time, writing was just getting its start, and Socrates was one of its greatest critics. He believed that communicating with a pen and paper left out the ability of the audience to interact with the writer. Socrates wrote, “you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality” (Plato 80). To Socrates, in writing it was just too easy to fake knowledge, or lie. Writing looks alive, but truly it, “shares a strange feature with painting. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever” (Plato 80-81). In the case of email, the reader cannot see the author of the email and therefore cannot know its truth. While some would argue the same is true in a face to face interaction, it is more likely that a person would be skeptical enough to pass on such an offer as the one posited above when interacting face to face with the author. Most people would have some questions to ask this person, but since the email cannot respond on its own, the recipient is left to make judgments based solely on the contents of the email, which according to Socrates is divergent of good communication. The very heart of the scam is that the author is “stuck” far away, and urgently needs help to come to the US. It is impossible for this scam to work if the author and recipient meet face to face. Socrates says, “. . . it seems to make a difference to you . . . who is speaking. . . Why, though, don’t you just consider whether what he says is right or wrong” (Plato 80)? Would it make a difference to the recipient if the author posed as someone other than a member of a royal family? I ask this, if you could see the author, would you be able to tell whether or not he was royalty? Chances are, you would get some cues that this person is either hiding something or is not who they claim to be. Email can be thought of as simply a new medium for an old technology. Instead of writing on paper, we now write on a computer screen. It still has not answered those criticisms posed to it all those centuries ago by Socrates and his contemporaries. While I in no way strive to discourage email, I simply encourage you, just as Socrates did, to listen to my speech, and make your own decision about the truth.