JEDDAH, 8 May 2005 — The Department of Foreign Affairs yesterday urged Filipinos at home and abroad to watch out for another scam targeting unwary users of the Internet.
Citing an report from the Philippine Embassy in Nigeria, the DFA said the scam calld 419 is being circulated via e-mail and purports to come from a Mrs. Bola Ibrahim, who claims that her husband and son had died in a motoring accident in the United Arab Emirates, leaving behind US Dollars sixteen million.
“The e-mail further states that Mrs. Ibrahim is dying of lung cancer, and would like to leave the money to someone who would use it to build a mosque,” said the DFA in a press statement.
Uninitiated recipients of the e-mail are asked to provide personal information so that Mrs. Ibrahim may forward this to her lawyers to facilitate the fund transfer.
According to the DFA, Ambassador Masaranga R. Umpa of the Philippine Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria reported that the e-mail was published in its entirety along with a warning contained in a note verbale from the Embassy of Cote d’Ivoire in Nigeria to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nigeria and to all diplomatic and consular missions in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
“The e-mail requests the receiver to provide detailed personal information so that funds may be allegedly transferred to his or her bank account. This information is actually used by the fraudster for illegal transactions,” said the warning.
The DFA urged the public to be careful in providing personal information to individuals promising large sums of money via bank transfers to avoid being victimized.
Such scams, while too good to be true, persist because the reality is that there are millions of people who easily fall for them, say authorities. “There are no fraudsters where there are no gullible people,” one analyst had once written.
