Please, feed me with further modalities

Day after day, it seems, I am contacted with offers to tap into mind-boggling riches beyond my wildest dreams. According to the letters I get, piles of gold and cash, stranded in offshore banks, await nothing but my nominal participation as a silent partner before they will be mine. Well, at least staggeringly generous percentages of them will be mine. The infinity and variety of the 419-scam, as these get-rich-quick offers are generically called, after the section of the Nigerian penal code that criminalizes them, suggest a wealth of west-African literary talent squandering their imaginations on the generation of bogus offers. The letters are filled with deceased oil-barons, cousins of Philippine despots, Russian countesses and international financiers, a cast of exotic characters worthy of any action-adventure epic.

We don't usually waste too much ink on these scammers, as there are plenty of others who make a hobby out of it. Another fascinating repository of this literary form is at the Nigerian scam letter museum. Reading through accounts of the long and tortured e-dialog that results from actually engaging one of these scammers is a great way to kill an afternoon, but here at antarcticiana we try to bring you only the cutting edge of meaninglessness, not the meaninglessness you can easily find elsewhere.

Today, however, I'm reporting the arrival of the first meta-419 scam to cross my screen, suggesting that innovation and creativity are alive and well in the boiler rooms of Lagos and Lomé. Here, Mrs. May Udoh and Mr. Moses Sylvanius, working for something called the Eco-bank PLC Compensation Office, offer me, a hypothetical victim of previous scams, the much-more-modest-than-usual sum of $150,000 to compensate me for moneys I already lost. This is actually quite genius, as those venal and gullible enough to have been scammed once are just the sort to respond to this long-awaited offer of justice and compensation for the wrong-doing they originally suffered. Those who have never succumbed to the scam still have a chance to be suckered, for they perhaps feel the same way I do: I'm the lucky recipient of a windfall because the Eco-bank has mistakenly identified me as someone who was scammed. I can hardly wait to get my hands on all that money!



ECO-BANK PLC
COMPENSATION OFFICE
ECOBANK/ UNITED NATIONS 2007 SCAM VICTIMS
COMPENSATIONS PAYMENTS.

ATTN: SIR/MADAM,

REF/PAYMENTS CODE: ECB/06654 $150,000 USD.

This is to bring to your notice that we are delegated
from the UNITED
NATIONS in Central Bank to pay 150 victims of scam
$150,000 USD (One
Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars Only each).You are
listed and approved
for this
payment as one of the scammed victims to be paid this
amount, get back to
this office as soon as possible for the immediate
payments of your
$150,000 USD compensations funds.

On this faithful recommendations, want you to know
that during the last
U.N. meetings held at Abuja, Nigeria, it was alarming
on the money lost
by various individuals to the scams artists operating
in syndicates all
over the world today. In other to compensate victims,
the UNITED NATIONS
Body is now paying 150 victims $150,000 USD each in
accordance with the
UNITED NATIONS recommendations. Due to the corrupt and
inefficient
Banking Systems in Nigeria, the payments are to be
paid by Central Bank
Nigeria as corresponding paying bank under funding
assistance by
BRITISH GOVERNMENT.

Benefactor of this compensation award will have to be
first cleared and
recommended for payment by ECO BANK PLC.

According to the number of applicants at hand, 114
Beneficiaries has been
paid, over a half of the victims are from the United
States, we still
have an outstanding of 36 scam victims left to be
paid. Other victims who
have
not been contacted can submit their application as
well for scrutiny and
possible consideration.

We shall feed you with further modalities as soon as
we get response from
you on how you intend receiving your compensation
payment.

Send a copy of your response and payment code to our
remittance officer:

NAME: MR.MOSES SYLVANIUS
SCAMMED VICTIM/REF/PAYMENTS CODE:
ECB/06654 $150,000 USD.
Email: ecobankplc_nig77@yahoo.co.uk

Yours Faithfully,
Mrs. May Udoh

UPDATE: A day after blogging this, I've already been found by someone searching for 'ecobank plc COMPENSATION OFFICE.' Naturally, we were number one on Google for those search terms. I can only hope that my post dissuaded them from participating in this Nigerian version of the Spanish prisoner scam. The same search reveals that someone posted an almost identical letter to Ripoff Report in mid-October. Who knows how and by what cancerous internet byways these things travel, but it is interesting to note that in the intervening six weeks the amount of the reward has gone from 100 to 150 thousand smackers, and Mrs. Udoh has changed her name from Joan to May. The former Mr. Iyamah Sylvanius is now, in late November, Mr. Moses Sylvanius, his Islamic-sounding name having been stripped away in favor of something more Christian-friendly. One imagines hordes of scammers stealing one another's breathless prose and making minor alterations to avoid gangland charges of copyright infringement.