Apologies, Ms Adams, but I Have My Suspicions

Scams are in the news again. It is, then, right and proper to share one’s knowledge of them; not only as a warning, but also to remind the reader that the world is full of folk keen to dupe the gullible. Although this particular scam did not end well, at least for one party, Shakespeare hit the wail on the head in All’s Well that Ends Well:

The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues. — Act 4, scene 3

On October 5 a while ago I received an unsolicited email from a person identifying as Charity Adams. This Charity was not a hostess at the Fandango Ballroom, as in the 1969 movie. Nevertheless, she came across as optimistic as the original Sweet Charity. As we shall see, she too had her share of misfortunes with the men in her life and – assuming she was a she – was, like Miss Austen, looking for Mr Right and a large fortune, not necessarily in that order.

At the time I was working in the precious metals business. Our group provided investment advice, mainly to the rich, sometimes to the erudite, but never to the famous. The company motto: Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi. In other words, “our gold is not ordinary gold”, or fool’s gold.

Someone once offered us use of a military airport in Indonesia if we could arrange a cash-on-delivery shipment of ten tonnes of the stuff; another wanted a mere fifty tonnes delivered somewhere north of Luang Prabang, or at Lantouy on the Laotian-China border, but that’s another story. And no, we couldn’t help them.

But to return to my story, Miss Adams probably was more familiar with the saying: “a fool and his gold are soon parted”. Anyone with the word “gold” in a domain name, of course, was – and still is – a prime scammer target.

The email subject line contained only one word: HELP. It came from a Yahoo address in France. Given the creativity displayed by Miss Adams, it is worth sharing the text here, verbatim et literatim:

Dearest Michael Kile,

It is my pleasure to write you after much consideration since telephone communication cannot be suitable enough to communicate to you at first.

Being the only daughter of my father, the late Chief GLEBART ADAMS from KWANATAL ZULU in Republic of South Africa (SA), I am 23 years of age.

My father was a limited liability Cocoa and Gold merchant in JOHANNESBURG South Africa before his untimely death. After his business trip to Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire to negotiate on a cocoa and gold business, he wanted to invest in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

A week after he came back from Abidjan, he was attacked with my mother by unknown assassins. My mother died instantly, but my father died after five days in a private hospital on that faithful afternoon. I didn’t know that my father was going to leave me after I had lost my mother.

Before he gave up the ghost, it was as if he knew he was going to die. He, my father, MAY HIS SOUL REST IN PERFECT PEACE, disclosed to me that he deposited the sum of $15,800,000 US dollars (FIFTEEN MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS) in a bank here in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

The money was meant for the cocoa and gold company he wanted to establish in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire…. Now I am soliciting for your assistance to help me to transfer this money out from Abidjan to your safe account abroad. We will invest it in any meaningful lucrative business in your country because this is my only hope in life.

Awaiting anxiously to hear from you so that we can discuss the modalities of this transaction.

Please kindly contact me through the above email immediately for more discussion.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Yours sincerely

CHARITY ADAMS

Three days later, by chance or demonic design, an advertisement in The Economist caught my eye. The International Cocoa Organisation was searching for a Librarian, “based in the Duty Station of Abidjan, Côte d-Ivoire. Tenure: five years, with the possibility of an extension.” A competitive tax-free salary, based on Grade P.1/2, would be offered to the successful applicant, in addition to other ex gratia benefits, presumably including choice of weapon, night goggles, free ammunition, pre-paid funeral expenses and all the chocolate you could consume while there.

What more could one want in a mad world than Miss Charity and chocolate? I thought for a moment, broke another dark Kit-Kat, then I pressed the DELETE button.

So if on a “faithful afternoon” you receive such an email, do stop, think and read the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s latest Targeting Scams report. Australians lost at least $3.1 billion to scams last year, an 80 per cent increase on losses in 2021. The report was based on data compiled by ACCC’s Scamwatch, ReportCyber, the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX), IDCARE and other government agencies. Investment scams were the highest loss category ($1.5 billion), followed by remote access scams ($229 million) and payment redirection scams ($224 million).

The country’s biggest losers, however, are elsewhere. More than $25 billion is lost each year on legal forms of gambling, excluding cock-fighting, two-up, etc.

Charity, surely, should begin at home.

Michael Kile keeps a bemused eye on the world from his Perth home