Nigerian Email Scam Victim Sues Bank, Loses Appeal 312
reidhellyer writes "From California Litigation Attorney Blog: 'While many victims of the so-called "Nigerian e-mail scam" would be too embarrassed to trumpet that fact, others end up infamous for their victimhood like the appellant in a published opinion of the California Court of Appeal in Riverside. In March 2009, Charles Peters received an email from someone purporting to be a citizen of Malaysia. The e-mail informed Peters that certain third parties in the United States and Canada owed the Malaysian money, but that “they can not transfer the funds to any bank account outside America continent due to their new company policy [sic].” He asked Peters to “assist me in receiving the funds and forward to me.” He offered to pay Peters 12 percent of the money. Peters agreed after apparently negotiating an increase of his fee to 15 percent.'"
Go for the real thing (Score:5, Funny)
Haha, what a tool. Everyone knows that only Nigerian citizens are the real deal.
15 Percent? (Score:2)
The latest version of this scam (Score:4, Interesting)
I received an e-mail of the latest version of this scam a couple of months ago. This time it was a US Marine trying to get money out of Iraq. After laughing at the idiocy of this I was joking with some friends that "Yeah, I bet the US government would like to get money out of Iraq too. Maybe this Marine should contact them." :P
bank responsibility (Score:2)
the bank told him his deposits cleared (Score:3)
Re:the bank told him his deposits cleared (Score:5, Funny)
Money lots of money being a debt collector! (Score:2)
What question works? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's the real issue here. Yes, the guy is an idiot for falling for an obvious scam. But this whole check clearing process is bullshit. A check is either good or it isn't. It either clears or it doesn't. There should be no in-between. There should be none of this bullshit of "well ... it has provisionally cleared .
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Now I agree that I feel the bank is the one that screwed up here. If you are told a check has cleared, then it is cleared. At that point, you have been told legally that the money is now yours and in your account free to do with as you please. At that moment, if something co
Re:What question works? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply put, banks own the world. If you screw up, you lose. If banks screw up, you lose.
Dear Slashdotters (Score:2)
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Dear Slashdotters, I am writing here in hopes that someone could help me with a problem. I assure you that you will be well paid for your efforts. I am a Martian Prince and have been exiled from my home planet. My planet and this one have been unwilling to allow me to transfer funds from zxabhins to US dollars ...
Ah-HA! You're not a Martian Prince! Any true Martian Prince would have enough of an education to know that Martians always capitalize any and all H's in proper nouns. Once again bad grammar exposes another scam artist.
Wow (Score:2)
Bad lawyering on both sides (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the California Court of Appeal opinion, neither the lawyer for the scam "victim" nor the lawyer for the bank identified the correct legal issue (apportionment of fault per the Uniform Commercial Code). And neither the lawyers nor the Court of Appeal picked up on the federal Check 21 law issue (the law that says banks are required to give credit against fake cashier's checks within one day after deposit).
The plaintiff's lawyer, because he didn't spot the UCC issue, almost certainly failed to discover or put on evidence that the bank was negligent in crediting the fake check.
Re:Bad lawyering on both sides (Score:4, Informative)
Oops. It's not Check 21 but Federal Reserve Regulation CC that requires banks to credit the full amount of a deposited cashier’s check within one business day (12 CFR 229.10(c)(v)).
Question (Score:4, Insightful)
FTA: "Peters deposited the $808,988.90 in checks received from the purported Malaysian at the Chino Commercial Bank. After the bank notified Peters that the checks had cleared, Peters wire transferred $468,000 to Hong Kong. Shortly thereafter, the checks were dishonored after the bank detected that they had been altered. Since Peters was personally liable for any overdrafts on the account which had only a few thousand dollars, the bank sought to attach property owned by Peters to collect on the overdraft. The trial court granted the bank’s motion to attach against Peters in the amount of $458,782.60...
Despite the obvious life lessons, the legal one is this – don’t transfer funds received unless and until you know that collection of the original deposit is final. This is particularly true for lawyers and others who receive funds in trust. (Chino Commercial Bank v. Peters, Dec. 13, 2010, Case No. E049170.)"
So my question is this -- HOW do you know that collection of the original deposit is final? (I've never even heard that phrase before.) Apparently being told "the check has cleared" doesn't do it?
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I don't think there is a way to tell from the depositing bank.
Some people say wait a month but banks say it can take up to 2-3 months for checks to clear.
The other way is to ask the bank that issues the check or money order to check if it has cleared. Obviously, this is a big problem if the issuer is outside the US.
And that is why this scam is popular. Once people put the check in the bank and the balance shows up, people think everything is legit and send money out of that balance.
Re:Question (Score:5, Funny)
When the bank will allow you to withdraw the money out of your account, in cash, while mentioning you need "spending money" because you are leaving on an extended trip* to [insert name of country without extradition].
* Where "extended" >= statute of limitations for bank fraud...
But you didn't get the super definite clear... (Score:4, Insightful)
After the bank notified Peters that the checks had cleared, Peters wire transferred $468,000 to Hong Kong.
Shortly thereafter, the checks were dishonored after the bank detected that they had been altered.
So what the hell does clearing a check mean? I always assumed that this means that the bank verified that the check was good and they received the funds from the other bank. How much later can a bank claim that a check is no good after it has cleared it?
You guys are all missing the point. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You guys are all missing the point. (Score:4, Informative)
There are only two possible conditions... (Score:2, Insightful)
Either the person has a legitimate condition limiting mental or emotional function, and as such needs to be protected from themselves (i.e. Dementia, Psychosis, Alzheimer, etc.)
OR
Someone has just paid their idiot tax. Being, promoting, empowering, electing, and/or justifying stupid is expensive, and our society is continually finding new and more interesting ways of paying that tax every day.
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A fool and his money...
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, in his defense, Maylasia isn't in Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maylasia [wikipedia.org]
When a bank tells you a check has cleared, that's only provisional subject to final clearance. Who knew?
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ther is no law against being dumb. There is also no law against banks lying about checks being cleared. Banks are above the law if it suits them. That is life. Get over it.
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
He doesn't sound quite as dumb as the blog post made him out to be.
If I deposit a check, and the bank tells me on the phone or in writing that it cleared, as an ordinary non-financial person I would assume that the money is secure in my account.
A bank has a greater knowledge of these matters than its consumer customers, and therefore a greater obligation.
My bank should be serving me and making a reasonable effort to look after my interest and avoid fraud.
The bank should know that these scams are going on. They should know that some of their customers are likely to fall for them, thinking that they've deposited valid funds.
The banks could stop this fraud by making it clear to their customers that even though the check has cleared and the money has been entered into their account, the entry is just provisional.
I think a bank has an obligation to do so.
So the victim had a reasonable case against the bank. He might have won if the courts decided that way. They didn't.
So now this fraud will go on.
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In England they seem to do this to some extent. When I take out 1000+ GBP in cash the bank asks you politely what it was for. Some people might take offence to that but they're simply making sure you're not about to give it all to some scammer.
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Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure the banks don't share in the blame. After all, they tell people the checks have cleared knowing damned well that most people don't know they might yet yank the money back out for a wide variety of reasons. In this case, the bank was more than happy to transfer a huge chunk of cash from the man's account, far more than he had ever had in there until the recent checks that had "cleared". Now it wants to take it out of his hide rather than pulling it back from the transfer.
The LEAST they could have done is told him when he checked that it was cleared was make sure he knew that didn't mean it couldn't be pulled out again. One lousy sentence out of a teller's mouth could have saved this guy half a million dollars worth of pain.
Yes, he should have known it was a scam (it's not just well known on sites like /., the local news has stories about it from time to time as well), but surely the banks should be VERY well aware of the scam and should at least make a minimal effort to warn their customers.
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course the people that fall for this are rather naive, but the banks give a good helping hand in fucking you over. If the money is shown as in your account and the bank confirms the check cleared, what are people really supposed to believe? Most people have never heard the words "provisionally cleared" until the bank slaps them with a half a million dollar lawsuit. This is a very common fraud method, other variations is that they somehow "overpay" you and trick you into sending part of the money back or to pay some fraudulent transport company or whatever. In rare cases they'll even try to buy goods and recieve them before the check bounces. Fuck that, the banks should be forced to either clear the check or bounce the check and eat the loss themselves exactly once. If they have to bounce many checks, tough shit. It can't be that hard to set up something like a WU branch office in Nigeria that'll let you send money if you've paid them with real cash and not phoney baloney checks.
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Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
So what are you proposing as an alternative? That the banks wait until each check has totally cleared(taking weeks or longer in some cases) to totally clear? What about the vast, vast majority of the cases where the check does clear? Should everyone else be forced to wait weeks so morons won't have to suffer the consequences of their own stupidity?
I assume that is exactly what the poster is proposing, and it is a damn good idea. The bank does not have to FORCE everyone to wait, but they should not say "the cheque has cleared", and then later say "sorry, the cheque has un-cleared, we want that money back."
It's OK for the bank to give you access to the money before they have it, but they should be 100% clear about the possibility of they clawing the money back. They should tell you that it is "provisionally clear" when you are allowed to take the money out but there is a chance they will ask for it back, and they should tell you it is "clear" when they are completely confident that they money is there and you can safely spend it. And once they have told you the cheque is "clear", then they have taken the risk.
Banks could do a lot more to prevent fraud, but they don't have really strong financial incentives to, because most of the banking laws are designed to push the risk from them to you. Why should they care when they aren't the ones losing the money?
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Banks could do a lot more to prevent fraud, but they don't have really strong financial incentives to, because most of the banking laws are designed to push the risk from them to you. Why should they care when they aren't the ones losing the money?
Maybe some sort of global financial meltdown will wake consumers up to that fact and they'll start voting cleverly for reform!
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Informative)
They are 100% clear about this. It's a part of the NACHA standards. It's typical to get the funds in your account the day after a check is wired to the Fed. But it's a very clear part of the standard that the recieving bank has 3 (IIRC) days to return an "NSF" and the customer has up to 60 days to dispute the check, and if either one happens, the funds are immediately pulled from your account. This is all part of the documented standard.
Check clearing is a centralized process. (Score:5, Interesting)
The bank DOESN'T sit on checks. They send the imprint (300dpi scan) and the information transcribed into a fixed format record to the check clearing house (its a branch [usually Chicago] of the Federal reserve who make billions of dollars off of the "float" so they DON'T ever let it linger.)
Banks make YOU wait x business days because they can.
The check has usually cleared within a single business day.
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Yeah, why not?
Why the hell should it take weeks? Why not 10 seconds for your bank to verify with the issuing bank -- they don't send messages by pony express any more, it's all digital. When it can make them money, they do the transaction in less than a second, keep it and play with it while you're waiting.
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Informative)
Why the hell should it take weeks?
Because it can take the account holder weeks to get their statement, see that someone has presented a fake check against their account, and cause the transaction to be dishonored. If this happens, the depositor who deposited the bad check doesn't have the right to the money, even if their account had been credited.
Being "totally clear" is not about moving money permanently; that is final settlement, when the bank says your check cleared they mean it has passed provisional settlement. Being totally clear is about agreeing to move money, and there being no issues.
Since it can take days before a review occurs or issues are reported, 10 seconds is not reasonable for settlement to occur. Even credit card transactions do not make provisional settlement so quickly, it takes 24 hours, and of course is not final until approximately 60 days, before that time the CC issuer has CHARGE-BACK rights, just as the bank paying a cheque has a CHARGE-BACK right.
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So what are you proposing as an alternative? That the banks wait until each check has totally cleared(taking weeks or longer in some cases) to totally clear?
Yes, banks -- which routinely delay availability of funds until checks have "cleared" -- should not say that checks have "cleared" and make funds available if the check has not, in fact, cleared.
If banks wish to provide additional service to their customers and make funds available when checks have not cleared but some preliminary and potentially inconclusive checks have passed, they should clearly distinguish to customers when this is the case rather than a check having actually cleared, particularly when
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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And even if not, because banks (yes, even in central Europe, which used to be THE place to go with your dirty money before a certain Island took over) tend to be wary of money laundering investigations, who in their right mind thinks that someone with a few billion bucks to shove around needs the aid of someone they don't know at all? People with billions of bucks at their disposal tend to have patsies they can use for that. For far, far less, I should probably add.
How greedy can you be to think they need Y
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Informative)
I recall a story several years ago when one of the biggest group of people suckered by these scams were accountants and people in similar financial professions. In short, the people that are in a position to know better than anyone else, but they're more likely to be suckered by the 409 type of scam.
Sounds logical to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone in the accountancy/banking business would have a whole career of experience telling them that it is both common and ethical to get free money.
Seems like they'd obviously be the ones to fall for it. To the rest of us, the promise of free money sends up a huge red flag, but to them its just a part of normal everyday business.
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Or maybe some people in accountancy actually gets emails asking them to help transfer money as a usual part of their of job - so it doesn't seem like an email send to a random person.
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I recall a story several years ago when one of the biggest group of people suckered by these scams were accountants and people in similar financial professions. In short, the people that are in a position to know better than anyone else, but they're more likely to be suckered by the 409 type of scam.
You'd think the maintenance people would be more likely to get caught up in 409 Scams [google.com]. We seriously need to clean this mess up.
419 scams [wikipedia.org] probably hit a disproportionate amount of Toledo residents [allareacodes.com].
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It still amazes me why none of the morons that fall for this ever seem to wonder why, out of the millions of people in the world, whats so special about themselves that some previously unknown foreign VIP in charge of millions would specifically contact them with such an "amazing opportunity".
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Hubris.
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody who is in that position where they thought part of it through but forgot the part about the first transaction being reverted will have to play stupid. They cannot admit that they had some idea what was going on, because then they would admit to have deliberately taken part in the crime. Playing stupid may be unlikely to get your money back, but with a bit of luck it may save them from a sentence.
Not saying this is necessarily saying this is what happened in this case, just saying that these people may not be as stupid as it looks. One saying goes: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence", another saying goes: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice". But in some cases it may actually be a combination of malice and stupidity, and it can be hard to tell how much of each.
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article you will notice the victim tried to be cautious. He deposited the check into his bank account. He later verified with the bank that the check had cleared. Only then did he wire funds out of his account. Sometime later the bank revoked the checks claiming they had been altered. Since the victim did not have any money to cover the lost funds the bank attached a lien to his property.
It was actually the bank that lost money. The bank is trying to collect from the victim. The victim sued the bank to have the lien removed from his property. He lost, and lost again on appeal.
Frankly, I think it is the bank that should be held responsible here. They are the ones that verified the check was good, that it cleared, that the funds were in the victim's accounts, and they are the ones that allowed the funds to be wired out of the country. Ultimately, the bank will be held liable since they will never collect their $468,000. But they are all-to-happy to do whatever they can to ruin the victim's life in the process.
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The scammers are well aware of the Flash money that vanishes when the bogus deposit fails to clear much later.
Unfortunately, there are too many that are not aware of this and get taken.
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Re:Duh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh.
We use the same system in The Netherlands. Checks are completely antiquated ofcourse. But you know what? International bank traffic can have the ability to revoke wire transfers as well. So one day the money is in your account and you hand over the carkeys. The next day the car is gone to Poland or Russia and a week later, the wire transfer is cancelled. And if you already spent that money on a new car, the bank will happily put your account in the red with a 19% yearly interest rate attached.
Don't think that wire transfers from dubious banks in Russia or Africa are much better than checks. You could get a very nasty surprise that way.
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Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
IUnfortunately, that's not how the bank thinks. The bank thinks "He used a false check to get money that wasn't his into his account". That he was in turn acting on behalf of a Malaysian fraudster who has run away with parts of the money is not relevant to them, the bank has never given the Malaysian any money. As far as they see it, the fraud was perpetrated by him against his bank account, and that's what they'll recover it against.
As long as you have the insane clearing system as you have, it has to be this way otherwise you could imagine the reverse scam where they collaborate, the bank has to eat a loss of $500k and then the two of them split the profit of $250k each. The sane solution would be a single and final clear/bounce, where the bank eats any loss. That'd probably lead to damn many checks bouncing at first but serious money transfers would adapt quickly and say "this is now the only way the US take payments".
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Oh yeah, and I should add to that.. the world needs to get out of last century. I've never written a check in my life, it's all plastic or cash. Debit cards go directly against your account and is far more practical and fraud-safe than checks without the high costs that cause shops to refuse taking Visa etc.
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Yeah but then you don't get reward points. Also bitcoin ftw.
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Seriously dude, do we pay for everything with checks? No, in fact checks are becoming obsolete for the very reason that you have to wait for them to clear.
With that said and forgetting that BitCoin is a pyramid scheme; why do you think BitCoin would be any better? It has all the problems of checks and none of the benefits.
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, and I should add to that.. the world needs to get out of last century. I've never written a check in my life, it's all plastic or cash.
I still use mostly checks to pay bills. I'd like the convenience of electronic payment of some kind, but not in the current implementation where businesses have saddled it with a bunch of baggage that allows them to continue leaching funds directly from customers whether the customers want them to or not. When I was younger, I learned the hard way that it's a lot easier to refuse to send a company a check than it is to get them to refund money they've already yanked out of your bank account.
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The insane thing is that they accepted a cheque for $500k. A fuckin cheque? Are you kidding me?? You'd think for that sum of money they would require identification, registered addresses, multiple signatures, and some other bullshit. I couldn't even deposit $100 into a friend's bank account at a bank without providing some form of photo ID. The bank deserves to be scammed.
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There's nothing that unusual about a $500k check. They get floated around when homes are bought and sold.
If (for example), I had a home worth $750k and I only owed $250k on it, upon selling it, I'd get a lovely $500k check.
Cheno and Riverside are in the Los Angeles area, and it's perfectly reasonable to for that to happen there. Hell, when I was out there, you couldn't buy a shithole 1br house in a dangerous neighborhood for $300k. That was before the housing
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The insane thing is that in 2010, we still use cheques. Everyone has cards, account numbers and PINs and smart chips. Even the cheapo pizza delivery joints around here take debit cards right at your door.
I can pay someone halfway around the world in four mouse clicks and a few keystrokes, why can't people pay local businesses as conveniently and securely ?
Numbers on a piece of paper are OBSOLETE!
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The sane solution would be a single and final clear/bounce, where the bank eats any loss
That would require personal responsibility on the part of the bank, and as we all know, personal responsibility in the finance world is a customer-only kind of thing.
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don't forget the other side to that. if banks eat the loss, then costs of transfers would go up, and/or banks will refuse to do transfers. It'll also go back to the previous mechanism where transfers take lots longer to clear (weeks or even ,onths) before money is available. and direct deposit goes out the window, too.
I imagine by "direct deposit" you mean businesses mailing in paychecks to be paid to employee accounts or something like that? The whole problem with checks is that you have to match what's deposited with what's issued. I can go into my online bank now and issue a payment today and it'll be in your account in the morning, fully settled between the banks. That money is gone, has left my account, left the bank and isn't coming back unless I sue you to get it back. My paycheck comes straight to my account each
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The problem here is that the victim checked that it had cleared, by which time, IMHO, it should be too late for the bank to reverse the transaction.
Yeah, that's exactly what's not happening. The banks can take the money back up to two months [fatwallet.com] after deposit. Taking unknown checks is economic extreme sports with no safety net.
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Interesting)
> He later verified with the bank that the check had cleared.
No. He verified that the check had been credited to his account subject to collection. Decades ago the bank would have postponed crediting his account for such a large, unusual item until after they had collected from the bank it was written on, but current law does not allow them to do that. This scam is a direct result of that law.
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There is nothing at all in the law that prevented the bank from telling him it was "cleared" but still subject to being pulled back. One sentence is not too much to ask in the name of customer service and could have saved a lot of grief.
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I realize it's not legally required, but perhaps it should be. Either way, the fact that the banks practically NEVER warn people that "cleared" doesn't mean what practically the entire non-bank employed population thinks it does goes a long way to showing that banks are becoming a cancer.
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know what you call a doctor if he pronounces you "perfectly healthy" but what he really means is there's an odd spot on your lung but it almost never turns out to be a rapidly developing cancer?
The defendant.
In other words, unlike the doctor, the bank KNEW that it was only provisionally cleared but chose not to inform the man of that rather important bit of information. It sounds to me like exactly the sort of "let's not worry about the impossible" that lead to the big financial meltdown.
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If you read the article you will notice the victim tried to be cautious. He deposited the check into his bank account. He later verified with the bank that the check had cleared.
The problem is that's not "being cautious" or the victim does not understand what "cleared" means; "cleared" items are only really certain to go through if they are bonafide, and the paying bank is solvent. If he were being cautious, he would have required a bank wire or certified funds, or he would have understood the pay
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it's a classic case of greed overcoming caution.
If you read the article you will notice the victim tried to be cautious.
So? It's still greed overcoming caution. He was somewhat cautious, but still much greedier...
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That was my reading as well. The bank explicitly told the account holder that the cheques had cleared, but then changed their mind. I thought the whole point of the clearing process and delays were to verify the validity and liquidity of a cheque.
As much as it offends me to side with the gullible fool, I think he took the proper precautions. Keep appealing until the bank loses, this is an abuse of power. The main reason 419 scams continue to thrive is because banks mislead their customers in a false sen
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You are the type of gullible person the bank likes as a customer. The delay is so they can embezzle your money on the forex trading market for a few days, which they generally lose money on, hence the need for huge charges to recoup their losses.
They lie about it, which is "obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception", and they all do it, which is "conspiracy to defraud". However, they bribe
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Since, the bank accepted a faulty Cheque I agree they should be the one's to ware the losst. If a store accepts a faulty bank note from an innocent customer then it's the store that takes the loss when the original forger can't be found. The customer is at best an unwilling participant especially if they were to ask the store to verify if the cash was ok.
Yes, a cautious idiot is still an idiot. But this guy is really a victim of the bank, they deceived him into accepting the cheque as genuine.
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When I was selling my bike I got a scam email in my Inbox. Since I was curious to see how the scam works I played along for a while. I received a check covering both my bike cost and the sanding fees. I checked the Internet to see where the scam is and I noticed that I'll get scammed from my bank.
You take the check to your bank, they validate it and give you the money. A couple of months later they will claim the money back, since the check is not valid and held you responsible.
I can't understand wh
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We could see an end to it very very simply.
The bank is the one in possession of all the information. No to mention they have the requisite sophistication to understand the entire process, check clearing houses, etc.
A bank customer understands one thing, and one thing only, the money is available . The answer is simplicity itself. If the bank says the money is available they are entirely liable by law.... done. None of the Nigerian scams will work anymore because the bank always ends up rejecting it.
Wha
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If that were the case, banks would never clear inter-bank payments over $500 or so until the entire window where the payment can be charged back has elapsed. That means all your large funds transfers take three to six months to clear (bad) or the window in which you can dispute a payment shrinks (bad). By overhauling our arcane and dilapidated ACH system to work more like how our credit networks function - specifically with regard to real-time authorizations - we can eliminate a lot of the big problems with
Re:How is this a Nigerian scam... (Score:5, Informative)
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... when the article clearly says it was a Malaysian doing the fraud, and the funds are transferred to a Hong Kong bank?
It's not even close to Africa.
News flash! Not all ponzi schemes are actually conducted by Charles Ponzi either, and some games of Russian Roulette are played by non-Russians outside of Russia...
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But the 419 scam *specifically* originates from Nigeria. After all it was named after the article number of the Nigerian criminal code.
The type of scam really is "Advance fee fraud" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_fraud [wikipedia.org]. The Nigerian scam is only a subtype of this.
Besides, the court decision in question http://www.rhlaw.com/blog/californialitigationattorney/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/E049170A.doc [rhlaw.com] specifically said "Nigeria-style email scam" instead of "Nigerian scam". Similarly, one cannot say t
Re:How is this a Nigerian scam... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just like "kleenex". Yes, it's technically called tissue paper, but thats now how a lot of people refer to it. If your grandmother asks you to hand her a kleenex and all you have is scott's brand tissue paper are you really going to say, "Sorry grannie, I don't have any kleenex."?
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In legal circles, the language HAS to be technically correct. Otherwise you risk all sorts of things, from frivolous lawsuits to straining diplomatic ties.
This "Nigerian scam" identification comes from a law blog. That's why it's bothersome.
It's the equivalent of requesting your supermarket to stock up Scott's brand tissue (maybe it's cheaper) and they stock up on Kleenex instead, and the supermarket just shrugs it off saying "it's the same thing."
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This "Nigerian scam" identification comes from a law blog. That's why it's bothersome.
Would you be this bothered if a law blog said a theory "had as many holes as Swiss cheese" but they were picturing Cheese made in America?? Seriously, at this point "Nigerian scam" is a name for a type of scam, not a place of origin, just as surely as "Swiss cheese" is no longer (in the US) a name for Cheese from Switzerland, but rather for a type of cheese.
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Would you tell someone that s/he's an "Indian giver" if a Native American is within earshot?
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Would you tell someone that s/he's an "Indian giver" if a Native American is within earshot?
I wouldn't use that term under any circumstances. It's both derogatory and based on false beliefs (the belief, once common in the US, that American Indians traded away their land fair and square and then wanted it back, when in reality it was the Europeans who went back on their word in the overwhelming majority of agreements between the two groups). Neither "Nigerian scam" nor "Swiss cheese" are derogatory terms, nor are they based on false assumptions. I would use the phrase "Nigerian scam" within ears
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Well, no, it's not like "Kleenex", because we're talking about human beings. Nigeria is a country with a population of 150 million people, and to label them all as thieves, or use their country's name as label meaning "thief" is pretty unpleasant, and basically racist. Consider how "jew" or "gypsy" was (and in some places still is) used as pejorative. And no matter how many Nigeria
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So it's OK to call someone a money-grubbing Jew because Jews, not bound by Christian tradition, traditionally fronted for wealthy landowners? Never mind that usury / advanced fee fraud has occurred well before and more often outside Jewry / Nigeria than within, Jews popularised usury so we need to associate them with it.
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None of those terms ascribe a criminal or immoral act to people of a specific nationality.
It does not suggest that all people from Nigeria are scammers.
Yes, it does.
If you don't like it then you are going to have popularize a new term, but good luck with that.
Well, sure, Nigerians don't
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In many cases, I would side with the victim over the bank but for an Internet e-mail scam? What rock has he been hiding under for the last 15 years?
The 1st thing you should ask is, why me? If this was legit, why wouldn't the person be looking for a reputable professional? For 12% of that kind of money, any number of qualified pros would do the job.
But, I take your point about the large deposit. I doubt my bank would operate like that and I believe that banks here bear the responsibility of fraudulent transa
text taken from the Turner Diaries (Score:2)
Author: William Pierce (as Andrew Macdonald), leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance
Published: 1978
http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Turner_Diaries.asp?xpicked=5&item=22 [adl.org]
you can find it posted in stormfront too, total drek
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Thanks, but our killer already finds that one.
But it's one of the reasons I read /. and other boards, they're a great source for samples.
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Is it really spyware/malformed PDF?
I was bored so I looked at it, but MS Sec Essentials didn't flag it.
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?
NAV doesn't see a problem with it
Ya, Norton Anti Virus is a quality virus finding program. Sort of like Mcafee is a quality virus finding program.
What I mean is, if you run those, virus will find your computers to be a good place to breed.
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The only thing Norton does efficiently is slow down your system. So if you would like to run old (mid 1990's) badly written games that speed up with the processor, you should try it. Otherwise: use MSSE or a free scanner (AntiVir was my drug of choice until MSSE came). They have far less overhead and far better detection chances. With antivirus software you get
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would the bank have still been able to come after him for it or would this have been the tip off that it hadn't "really" cleared ?
Yes, they would have come after him. And they would have hit him with other fees and penalties as well.