Police: Carlisle Woman Targeted By Nigerian Scammer

Carlisle Police say a scam artist in Nigeria targeted a woman in town, and had she fallen for it and cashed the fake money orders, Leslie Archambeault would be out more than a $100,000.

They seem endless – rows of money orders spread out on the Carlisle Police Department floor.

“I have been in contact with different agencies that this is going on all around in the area,” said Officer Mark Snedegar.

The scam is the same said Snedegar – asked to cash a money order, you keep some, but mail the rest to the scammer. Only the money order is bogus and you’re out the cash you sent to scammer.

Except this time, Snedegar said he’s never seen some 80 money orders sent to just one person.

“He definitely abused my trust,” said Leslie, who, if she would have complied, would have lost $132,000.

“He posed as someone being nice and we became friends and he told me he loved me and he had a job that I could make $300 a month on,” said Leslie.

Her relationship with the man started a year ago in a chat room. She said he’s from Nigeria, and Thursday, he mailed her the brown-paper package, too suspicious-looking not to give police.

“If you don’t know the person, don’t even associate with them, especially when they start talking money or your social security number or your date of birth or anything like that,” said Officer Snedegar.

Archambeault cut all ties with the scammer and limits her time online to doing school work. Officer Snedegar’s work is with State Police and the Secret Service to try and crack this case.

Snedegar says real money orders or checks have a watermark. Fake ones don’t and the Nigerian connection is also a tipoff that it’s a scam.

Woman sentenced for role in Nigerian scam

By Heather Polischuk, Leader-Post

A Regina woman received a community-based sentence for her role in a Nigerian scam that targeted hundreds of American citizens in 2009 and 2010.

Roseanne Nightingale pleaded guilty to a fraud charge during an appearance at Regina Provincial Court on Wednesday.

Court heard the 44-year-old, who was attempting to support her family while on social assistance, became involved in the ploy as a way to earn some extra money for groceries and items for her children.

At first, she hadn’t realized she was doing anything illegal in mailing off the cheques sent to her from Nigeria. She eventually found out otherwise.

“I should have stopped when I realized,” she acknowledged in court.

Her defence lawyer Pat Reis said his client had earlier expressed her remorse, telling him, “I feel sorry for what I did. I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

Crown prosecutor Jerome Tholl said it’s not known whether Nightingale’s actions did, in fact, hurt anyone directly.

Despite police having discovered a list of numerous names, no one got back to investigators to say they had, in fact, lost any money as a result of the scam.

Court heard that on Nov. 10, 2010, Canada Border Services Agency officers discovered a package of pre-filled cashiers cheques and U.S. postal money orders en route to Nightingale’s address from Nigeria.

The cheques and money orders were found to be forgeries and represented a total of $260,100.

While Nightingale wasn’t involved in the forgeries, she was the intended recipient and the find led police to execute a search warrant at her Regina home 10 days later. At that time, police seized a computer that contained emails from a Nigerian contact, cheque printing software and lists of “jobs” with hundreds of names of would-be American targets.

The ploy, known as an advanced payment scheme, had Nightingale sending off the phoney cheques to the targets with instructions to contact an email address (not hers) for further instruction. From there, the would-be victims would be asked to deposit the cheques into their personal bank accounts. The target would then be told to obtain a money order or a certified cheque for a lesser amount – supposedly allowing them to keep a certain amount for their trouble – to a separate address (not Nightingale’s). With this type of scheme, the cheque or money order eventually bounces, leaving the victim out their money.

Nightingale admitted to police she’d been involved in sending the cheques, estimating she’d sent at least a couple hundred over the course of about a year. She said she received only a few thousand dollars for her role.

While Tholl said there was no evidence of actual monetary loss to the victims, “risk of deprivation” was all that was needed to make out the fraud charge – leading to the guilty plea.

Judge Jeff Kalmakoff agreed to impose the jointly recommended sentence, an 18-month conditional sentence. The order contains numerous conditions, including that Nightingale spend the first six months under house arrest. She is also to report any activity for which she receives payment and not contact anyone connected with Nigeria in relation to business matters.

Multiply multilingual – Email scams aren’t just from Nigeria

Lottery scam emailThey used to be called “Letters from Nigeria”, but it’s not such a good name these days. Because they can come from any corner of the world, in a multitude of languages.

Many of us are all too familiar with the emails we can receive out of the blue, suggesting that a fortune is within our grasp.

Unfortunately, just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s also plenty of scammers out there waiting to take advantage of you with fake lotteries and false inheritances.

Here, for instance, is an email I recently received telling me that I had won a lottery.

419 scam

The email to me (an Englishman) explains (in Norwegian) that I have won a prize in a lottery (held in Madrid).

Have you got your head around that? Good.

Don’t let the fact that you never entered the lottery disturb you, or let a question mark raise its ugly head with the thought of why such a big lottery winner would receive the exciting news via email.

Instead, feast your eyes on the email’s Word attachment (if you read Norwegian that is):

419 scam

And my luck didn’t end there! Turns out I won another lottery on the same day! What are the chances?

This time, I’m told about my big win in French.

419 scam

Again, I hadn’t participated in the sweepstakes – but that’s no barrier it seems to winning a lottery these days.

And as with the previous example, much of the detail of the lottery are contained inside an attachment (this time it’s a PDF file).

419 scam

In case anyone is in any doubt at all, it’s worth explaining what is going on here.

The above are all examples of a common scam known variously as “Letters from Nigeria”, “419 scams” or “Advance Fee Fraud”.

In the unsolicited emails the sender offers a large amount of money. Once the victim has been drawn in, requests are made from the fraudster for private information which may lead to requests for money, stolen identities, and financial theft.

The name “419 scam”, by the way, comes from the relevant section of the penal code in Nigerian, the country which is probably best-known for this sort of scam.

It’s wrong to characterise one part of the world as being responsible for such scams these days, as it’s truly a global phenomenon. Although some parts of the world seem to have had cottage industries spring up around email scams, it’s within the capability of anyone with an internet connection to try to make a quick buck out of it.

And unfortunately there are vulnerable people out there who fall for such scams, every single day.

In the worst cases, we’ve even seen people kidnapped by email scammers.

So please take care, don’t believe every email you receive, and keep a watchful eye over those friends and family who might be vulnerable to this kind of approach.