The northlondonhippy

Archive for July 15th, 2008

If you’re like me, you receive a lot of emails from bankers in Nige­ria, offer­ing you the con­tents of some­one else’s sub­stan­tial bank account after they died, leav­ing no heirs. All you need to do is send them enough of your money to cover the trans­fer fees and a bazil­lion quid will be all yours.

It’s called advanced fee fraud, oth­er­wise known as the “419 Scam” and its believed to have orig­i­nated in West Africa.

I have many email addresses and a fair few of them are pub­lished on the inter­net, which means I get dozens of these emails every day. It always amazes me how many of them get past the myr­iad of spam fil­ters allegedly pro­tect­ing my inboxes.

That’s why I found the results of the fol­low­ing BBC inves­ti­ga­tion so very interesting:

“I was vic­tim of a Niger­ian foot­ball conmen”

They’ve started to scam money from peo­ple closer to home.

They’ve also started scam­ming poor people.

I can only guess that less of us rich peo­ple in the West are falling for these scams, so they’ve had to turn to aspir­ing young foot­ballers to compensate.

Read­ing that report just made me sad.

It’s easy to exploit people’s dreams. You would be amazed how sim­ple it is to con­vince some­one of almost any­thing, as long as you wrap it in the words they need to hear the most.

There’s a pop­u­lar scam involv­ing aspir­ing mod­els and actors, where some­one pre­tend­ing to be an agent, offers to rep­re­sent them but first they need to get a photo port­fo­lio (or audi­tion video) pro­duced for lots of money. Nat­u­rally, the agent can arrange every­thing, because his brother-in-law is the photographer.

No agent would ever charge you money or force you to get pho­tos done through them. A real agent would offer to rep­re­sent you for a per­cent­age of future earnings.

Of course, they sell it all bet­ter than I just did, by telling you how beau­ti­ful or tal­ented you are and how they have an eye for spot­ting future stars and baby, that’s you!

Where do I sign? How much for the pho­tos? Do you really think I will be famous?

Fame is so over­rated. Given the choice, I’d much rather be seri­ously wealthy and anony­mous, than famous and poor.

I don’t think I have to worry about being rich or well known. At least not at this rate.

Unless you’re an eccen­tric bil­lion­aire who’s taken a bit of a shine to a cer­tain north Lon­don based hippy of ques­tion­able moral fibre…? I could do with a patron. How about a cou­ple of hun­dred grand a year, plus expenses?

Weed and high end elec­tron­ics ain’t cheap, you know!