Stupid woman loses $400,000 to Nigerians

[rbcp]

From Albany-Democrat Herald:

SWEET HOME — A Sweet Home woman has fallen prey to an international network of professional scam artists, and now she’s working with a money management service to climb out of $400,000 in debt.

“As a reverend and an American, I just wasn’t prepared for that level of dishonesty,” said Janella Spears.

Spears, a nursing administrator in Lebanon and a volunteer at Sweet Home Community Chapel, lost the huge sum of money through many small payments to various e-mail scammers that claimed to be from Canada, Texas, Africa and other places.

She’s been defrauded by people claiming to represent banks, credit companies, her relatives, the police and even the FBI.

[rbcp]

This just nuts.  Click on the article to read the whole thing.  The highest she paid them at once was $15,000.  How could anyone be this dumb?  I can  see someone losing maybe $5,000.  But $400,000???  And she says “I kept thinking it’s only a couple hundred dollars. I can get it back.”  I hate this lady so much.

When I see people fall for this kind of thing, I root for the Nigerians.  If she can afford to just throw all her money away to scammers, then the scammers deserve it more than her.  She says she'll have all the debt paid off in a mere 4 years anyway, so she must be loaded.  Those Nigerian scammers must be so rich.

[Zazen]

"Police have insisted that Spears no longer respond to anyone e-mailing her about money."

That makes it sound like they told her to stop but she kept doing it anyway. So now they're insisting.

[rogueclown]

she said she lost it in small payments, and some of them were as much as fifteen thousand smackers?

someone doesn't know the value of a buck.

not to mention, i still wonder how anyone can be dumb enough to fall for those things anymore.  they are officially the oldest trick in the book.

[rbcp]

Might be funny to prank call her and pretend to scam money from her just to hear her response.  I bet she'd say, "Fool me once, shame on me...fool me 825 times, shame on you!"

Guess it'd be a bad idea to do that if the FBI is involved though.

[linear]

How do you fall for this trick multiple times with multiple different people?

I can understand a naive little old lady sending the exiled prince of lebanon a few grand to get back on his feet once, but how does this ever happen a second time? don't you catch on after the first failure?

christ.

[rbcp]

Is she a nurse?  Where'd she get all that money?  I bet she loves having her picture in the paper attached to a story about what a dumbass she is.

[SpaceBison]

Instead of sending it to the Nigerians these people should just send it to me instead.

[Tachyon]

My favourite part is 'as a reverend and an American'. Aren't reverends supposed be all about teh sinz (telling other people not to, but you know what I mean)?

[Sidepocket]

Two things:

1) I think this describes perfectly what happened to our economy.

2) I have an idea for how to get money for charity like in Darfur...