John Rempel said he quit his truck driving job, lost friends, borrowed money and crossed the globe in pursuit of a non-existent inheritance, after he was contacted by e-mail in what is known as a Nigerian 419 scam.
Rempel said he borrowed $55,000 from an uncle in Mexico and his parents gave him $60,000 on credit to cover fees for transferring $12.8 million into his name.
“They’re in it now because of me,” said Rempel, 22, breaking into sobs. “If it wasn’t for me, nobody would be in this mess. You think things will work out, but it doesn’t. It’s a very bad feeling. I had lots of friends.
“I never get calls anymore from my friends. You know, a bad reputation.”
His troubles began in July 2007. He said he got an e-mail from someone claiming to be a lawyer with a client named David Rempel who died in a 2005 bomb attack in London, England, and left behind $12.8 million.
[...]
The lawyer said his client had no family but wanted to leave the money to a Rempel. It was his lucky day.“It sounded all good so I called him,” said Rempel.
#19, Mr. Moran,
Thank you for not living up to the new take on your name.
#16, ECR,
Good points. Is it our innate greed or our naive trust of people that allows these scams to flourish. As long as there is a will, there be some scammer trying to get a piece of the action.
Is this guy stupid? Probably no more than any of Bernie Maddoff’s victims. Scams are not relegated to just one socio-economic group. We readily see scammers preying on the elderly, the religious, and with today’s worsening economy, the unemployed.
BTW, lottery ticket sales are increasing rapidly. Only they are a government sponsored scam.
He probably uses Windows and IE as well.
#21, gq,
He probably uses Windows and IE as well.
Windows still has 90% of the market and IE is close to that. I guess that is a safe bet.
Friend of yours?
He also said oil was going up to 200 a barrel.
Oh, that was Rubin from CIBC world markets or T Boone Pickens or Goldman Sachs.
#9 and #18, could we ask that you guys be a little better informed so as not to make yourselves look like a butt wipe?
i love the look on his face.
damn wouldn’t like to be in his shoes. but then again there’s always something worse in the world. and some people have lost even more money and experienced worse tragedies.
“The Spanish Prisoner” is an excellent scam. The Nigerian Scam and its variants make a very key mistake: they start off way too high. Greed causes you to do something wrong or immoral to get your loot. These scams are nothing but taking advantage of simple minded credulous people. My mother got that notice that went around about winning a lottery in England. I told her to “go for it” until such time as they want any money to process anything. She emailed back but never got a return.
Still—how many of us carefully read “Free Shipping” or “Free After MIR”. Same thing, different degree.
# 2 Shucks said, in part:
“1. Why don’t any of these scams originate from Mexico, or Latvia, or Peru????? What is it with Nigeria?”
Nigeria used to be a fairly successfully governed country, with a thriving middle class, widespread education, large numbers of skilled engineers, etc. Then it became a kleptocracy and everything went to hell. Large numbers of people went on the grift to get by, and since there were lots of technically educated people, Nigerians became disproportionately represented in the annals of Internet crime. In particular, they seem to have specialized in this kind of come-on, so much so that wherever it originates from, it’s usually called a Nigerian scam.
Actually, this particular scam originated in Great Britain, but got labeled with the “Nigerian 419 scam” tag because of this very reason. (“419″ being the section of Nigerian law dealing with this kind of fraud.)
I always ignored those emails since having email for first time in 2003, except 1 time in 2007 I decided to reply with tons of insults to the sender just for fun, and the result was after 30 minutes i found my yahoo inbox flooded with 606 (exactly that number) of messages :S
it took me an hour to remove everything and never decided to reply again :S
Free money is only for the wealthy.
There was no video when I clicked on it, it said: “This video has been removed by the user”.
Why waste my time like that?
-Crompy
[If you'll notice, the story was from almost two years ago. We don't keep things updated. --ed.]
Wondering forums is fun, reading POSTED dates saves you from admitting you commented on something OLD, SOLVED, PAST DUE..