CAIRO: Emails posing as close aides of deposed Arab leaders such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi have offered recipients an amazing deal: give them your full bank account details and they will transfer millions of dollars from the corrupt regime's offshore accounts in order to safeguard it. In return they will give you a percentage of what they place in to your bank account. Sounds too good to be true? That is because it is. Removing the moral implications of actually aiding corrupt officials embezzle funds, which is guaranteed to be a highly illegal offense wherever you are, such deals are highly unrealistic. “The quantity of attacks of this sort that we detect is enormous,” said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at Sophos, which uses sophisticated spam filters to identify scam emails. An example of such an email comes from one of the wives of Gaddafi. The email says she has managed to flee to Tunisia, and is looking for a reliable partner to transfer $25 million of Gaddafi's money. “I am very sick of these wars. People are dying every day. I am offering 35 percent and you will also help me invest 65 percent of my share into any lucrative business in your country … but if not please keep it safe for me until everything goes quiet,” the email reads. It seems even Mubarak's wife has appealed to unknown email recipients, playing on the common preconceptions many westerners have on Islamic societies. According to the email, she has “been thrown into a state of antagonism, confusion, humiliation, frustration and hopelessness by the present military leadership of the Egyptian Liberation Organization … As a woman that is so traumatized, I have lost confidence with everybody in the country at the moment.” Inevitably, she has money she wants the recipient to hold as “the Muslim community has no regards for women.” Another technique is to ask for an advance fee to guarantee the money. Recipients are asked to pay a sum of money upfront in exchange for a massive deposit. The scam is known as the 419 scam. The name refers to the Nigerian Criminal Code, and is accredited to its roots in Nigeria. “The ‘story' of a deposed ruler trying to get money out of the country sounds very plausible and in addition it relates to current events which gives it more credit,” said Avi Turiel, who works at Internet Security company Commtouch. “It allows the scammers to say something new – as opposed to the traditional scams which people might be familiar with,” he continued. Internet scams have been around since the advent of the Internet. In January of 2009, Internet crime statistics showed that on average the 419 scam cost each victim 1,650 dollars. Over 66 percent of perpetrators who were reported were from the United States, and 74 percent of these scams originated in emails. BM
