Are people REALLY this stupid?
http://www.katu.com/news/34292654.html
By Anna Song KATU News and KATU.com Web Staff
SWEET HOME, Ore. – Janella Spears doesn’t think she’s a sucker or an easy mark.
Besides her work as a registered nurse, Spears – no relation to the well-known pop star – also teaches CPR and is a reverend who has married many couples. She also communicates with lightning-fast sign language with her hearing-impaired husband.
So how did this otherwise lucid, intelligent woman end up sending nearly half a million dollars to a bunch of con artists running what has to be one of the best-known Internet scams in the world?
Spears fell victim to the "Nigerian scam," which is familiar to almost anyone who has ever had an e-mail account.
The e-mail pitch is familiar to most people by now: a long-lost relative or desperate government official in a war-torn country needs to shuffle some funds around, say $10 million or $20 million, and if you could just help them out for a bit, you get to keep 10 (or 20 or 30) percent for your trouble.
All you need to do is send X-amount of dollars to pay some fees and all that cash will suddenly land in your checking account, putting you on Easy Street. By the way, please send the funds though an untraceable wire service.
By this time, not many people will fall for such an outrageous pitch, and the scam is very well-known. But it persists, and for a reason: every now and then, it works.
For Spears, it started, as it almost always does, with an e-mail. It promised $20 million and in this case, the money was supposedly left behind by her grandfather (J.B. Spears), with whom the family had lost contact over the years.
"So that's what got me to believe it," she said.
Spears didn't know how the sender knew J.B. Spears' name and her relation to him, but her curiosity was peaked.
It turned out to be a lot of money up front, but it started with just $100.
The scammers ran Spears through the whole program. They said President Bush and FBI Director "Robert Muller" (their spelling) were in on the deal and needed her help.
They sent official-looking documents and certificates from the Bank of Nigeria and even from the United Nations. Her payment was "guaranteed."
Then the amount she would get jumped up to $26.6 million – if she would just send $8,300. Spears sent the money.
More promises and teases of multi-millions followed, with each one dependent on her sending yet more money. Most of the missives were rife with misspellings.
When Spears began to doubt the scam, she got letters from the President of Nigeria, FBI Director Mueller, and President Bush. Terrorists could get the money if she did not help, Bush’s letter said. Spears continued to send funds. All the letters were fake, of course.
She wiped out her husband’s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for.
For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted.
Spears said she kept sending money because the scammers kept telling her that the next payment would be the last one, that the big money was inbound. Spears said she became obsessed with getting paid.
An undercover investigator who worked on the case said greed helped blind Spears to the reality of the situation, which he called the worst example of the scam he’s ever seen.
He also said he has seen people become obsessed with the scam before. They are so desperate to recoup their losses with the big payout, they descend into a vicious cycle of sending money in hopes the false promises will turn out to be real.
Now, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim.
She hopes her story will warn others to listen to reason and avoid going down the dark tunnel of obsession that ended up costing her so much.
Spears said it would take her at least three to four years to dig out of the debt she ran up in pursuit of the non-existent pot of Nigerian gold.
By Anna Song KATU News and KATU.com Web Staff
SWEET HOME, Ore. – Janella Spears doesn’t think she’s a sucker or an easy mark.
Besides her work as a registered nurse, Spears – no relation to the well-known pop star – also teaches CPR and is a reverend who has married many couples. She also communicates with lightning-fast sign language with her hearing-impaired husband.
So how did this otherwise lucid, intelligent woman end up sending nearly half a million dollars to a bunch of con artists running what has to be one of the best-known Internet scams in the world?
Spears fell victim to the "Nigerian scam," which is familiar to almost anyone who has ever had an e-mail account.
The e-mail pitch is familiar to most people by now: a long-lost relative or desperate government official in a war-torn country needs to shuffle some funds around, say $10 million or $20 million, and if you could just help them out for a bit, you get to keep 10 (or 20 or 30) percent for your trouble.
All you need to do is send X-amount of dollars to pay some fees and all that cash will suddenly land in your checking account, putting you on Easy Street. By the way, please send the funds though an untraceable wire service.
By this time, not many people will fall for such an outrageous pitch, and the scam is very well-known. But it persists, and for a reason: every now and then, it works.
For Spears, it started, as it almost always does, with an e-mail. It promised $20 million and in this case, the money was supposedly left behind by her grandfather (J.B. Spears), with whom the family had lost contact over the years.
"So that's what got me to believe it," she said.
Spears didn't know how the sender knew J.B. Spears' name and her relation to him, but her curiosity was peaked.
It turned out to be a lot of money up front, but it started with just $100.
The scammers ran Spears through the whole program. They said President Bush and FBI Director "Robert Muller" (their spelling) were in on the deal and needed her help.
They sent official-looking documents and certificates from the Bank of Nigeria and even from the United Nations. Her payment was "guaranteed."
Then the amount she would get jumped up to $26.6 million – if she would just send $8,300. Spears sent the money.
More promises and teases of multi-millions followed, with each one dependent on her sending yet more money. Most of the missives were rife with misspellings.
When Spears began to doubt the scam, she got letters from the President of Nigeria, FBI Director Mueller, and President Bush. Terrorists could get the money if she did not help, Bush’s letter said. Spears continued to send funds. All the letters were fake, of course.
She wiped out her husband’s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for.
For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted.
Spears said she kept sending money because the scammers kept telling her that the next payment would be the last one, that the big money was inbound. Spears said she became obsessed with getting paid.
An undercover investigator who worked on the case said greed helped blind Spears to the reality of the situation, which he called the worst example of the scam he’s ever seen.
He also said he has seen people become obsessed with the scam before. They are so desperate to recoup their losses with the big payout, they descend into a vicious cycle of sending money in hopes the false promises will turn out to be real.
Now, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim.
She hopes her story will warn others to listen to reason and avoid going down the dark tunnel of obsession that ended up costing her so much.
Spears said it would take her at least three to four years to dig out of the debt she ran up in pursuit of the non-existent pot of Nigerian gold.
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8 Comments
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Comment by asaad on November 30, 2008 at 7:33am -
oh no. this poor dumb thing. i bet we'll hear about her taking her happy ass to vegas to get violated out of everything else she hasn't already bent over and offered up. i can already see the dealer at the blackjack tables biting a hole in his goddamn lip, trying so hard not to laugh in her stupid face, but just repeatedly fucking her out of her retirement, then her husband's retirement, then her kid's education.
i hope she gets the help she needs. just shittle brained, y'know? jeez...
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Comment by Derek on November 16, 2008 at 8:58pm -
Yeah. I still find it INCREDIBLE that people would continue to send money after sending ANYTHING over $1000 - even $500. I "know" people that really think that they could make millions of dollars for spending couple of hundred.
So, millions of spam messages with a hit of 100's makes decent money.
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Comment by Tsuko on November 16, 2008 at 7:48pm -
sure it's not the other spears that fell for it?, damn.
Crap like this persists because it is inanely cheap to do, same for spam mail. I heard of a study somewhere that one out of 12500000 spam mails is responded, problem is that sending that many spam mails is very very cheap, so you somehow make money out of it.
See? big number's theory bitting our asses.
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Comment by Derek on November 15, 2008 at 12:46pm
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@shitboy. Yeah. I never underestimate. I just find it OK to be uniquely stupid. But, imagine this: There is a long line, people are passing a door. The sign on the door says "Come inside and we will kill you." The people that go in are the non-uniquely stupid.
They see the warning, and disregard it.
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Comment by shitboy on November 15, 2008 at 12:31am - note to derrick: never underestimate people's capacity to be stupid. maintain faith that mankind can and will evolve; until then practice never being suprised when people are really really stupid. i'm stupid all the time! how can i hold anyone else up to a higher standard than even i am able to live up to?
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Comment by Jared Robinette on November 15, 2008 at 12:28am - oh man, i don't even have to read that whole posting. that scam has been going on FOREVER. you have to be a fucking moron to fall for that. I read a posting on Craigslist and replied to a room for rent. the dude sends me one of these obvious scams about how he wants me to send him the first months rent to a p.o. box and he'll mail me the keys. i sent back a letter that said "go fuck yourself you dirty scamming peice of shit". but he probably didn't understand it.
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Comment by 9swords on November 14, 2008 at 10:03pm -
Re- baptized ...lol ---This video scared me my heart jumped up until i saw that they were OK lol---lol
-My wife gets those emails also i guess nobody is doing anything about it because it's still going on
-wouldn't you think that impersonating government officials from other countries to scam
-money out of people would be enough incentive for I.S.P's to trace these accounts and put a stop -to this ??? ... It's Bizzare.
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Comment by tubejay on November 14, 2008 at 8:52pm -
Spears – no relation to the well-known pop star – also teaches CPR and is a reverend who has married many couples. which is really useful if this is your best man:
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