Today I received three letters from the "former finance minister of Nigeria"
in the past I have also had letters from his wife and countless other African
officials offering to share millions of pounds with me, if I just send them my
bank details.
Another list member has told me that he has also had similar letters recently
and that he suspects that his details have been taken from the archive of
this or similar lists
The Nigerian Finance Minister Scam, is a serious scam and there are reports o
f people who have fallen for the temptation losing thousands of pounds /
dollars / euros and reports of at least one person who was murdered whilst trying
to recover his lost money.
Rootsweb does try to mask e-mail addresses which appear in the archive of
list messages, so that they cannot be harvested by computers that crawl through
internet sites looking for addresses to which they can send Spam. However as
the finance minister's letters are also sent to an address which I use
exclusively for a family surname mailing list, it looks like these crooks go through
mailing lists, etc. and manually extract addresses and personal details.
As the purpose of internet genealogy mailing lists is to offer and ask for
help from people who we do not know, it is difficult to do so without leaving
ourselves open to contact from the unscrupulous as well as those who genuinely
want help.
It is difficult to avoid receiving these letters, but there are a few things
that we can do to make sure that we are not conned by the unscrupulous
Firstly NEVER respond to unsolicited letters asking for money, passwords or
bank details. If an offer seems too good to be true — there is a 99.99% chance
that it isn't true.
Delete, without reading unsolicited personal letters. Use the Lists to
communicate with other family historians rather than e-mailing them personally. If
you feel that a response is not suitable for inclusion on the list, write to
the List saying something like 'I will e-mail you off list with information
about...." the recipient will then expect a personal message from you. If you have
to send an e-mail to somebody you don't know, without list contact, make sure
that the subject line is clear and relevant to your message. Letters headed
"Please Help" or "Hello from California" will be deleted unread by
many of us
who regularly have large daily inboxes and huge amounts of spam!
Report scam messages to your own Internet Service Provider (ISP), the senders
ISP and, if appropriate, your local police station.
List administrators have our own mailing list where many of the latest scams,
spams and viruses are bought to our attention. If you have any doubts,
concerns or questions about an e-mail you have received ask your list administrator
for advice before responding. All list admins can be contacted using the
generic e-mail address:
LISTNAME-admin(a)rootsweb.com
changing LISTNAME for the lists name
So you can contact me, for example by writing to:
WLS-GWYNEDD-admin(a)rootsweb.com
You can contact Huw and Jill at Glamorgan through
GLAMORGAN-admin(a)rootsweb.com , or Vic at Clwyd through CLWYD-admin(a)rootsweb.com (remember
that all the
lists for the north west of Wales have WLS- before the county name)
All the best
Alwyn