A friend of mine contacted me on QQ, quite concerned about a friend she had met on Englishbaby. Her friend had contacted her and told her a story of being in a refugee camp. She was penniless, poor, hungry and desperate but she convinced my friend that she had access to $3.5 million dollars, which had been left to her by her father. Does this sound familiar? Do you know what this is all about? Have you been contacted by anyone who has told you a similar story?
First of all, if you get a message like this, report it to the owner of the website or simply ignore it. All of these messages are what we call scams in English. The people who do this are called scammers. This type of scam usually originates in Nigeria or Ghana, and sometimes other African countries. The messages are all basically the same. The person, who is always a man but pretends to be a woman, contacts you and says that they have something important to share with you or they will send you a picture of themselves after you email them at their personal email address which is almost always a Yahoo address and sometimes a gmail address. They will say something like: age and race don't matter. It will seem that they are very interested in you personally and you may feel comfortable with the person and the messages.
Please ignore these messages and report them as spam. I haven't received any messages like this on QQ but I get them on hotmail and yahoo all the time. The people who send these messages are criminals, thieves and fraud artists. They befriend you and gain your confidence, then try to steal your hard-earned money from you.
Basically, the scam plays upon your own greed for money. The thief tells you that they have access to a huge amount of money that has been left to them by a relative. Because of political situations in their country, they can't get to the money. With your help, and with your money, they can get to the funds and will share them with you. As you may have guessed, there is no money in the first place. Everything to do with this scam is a lie. People all over the world are tricked by this activity and China, because it is just opening up to the world, is ripe for criminal activities of this kind.
Sometimes the criminals are right there among you working on other scams. They might say that they have money to invest in your company or they might want to buy something that you are selling but they will have a very complicated shipping arrangements which will involve an exchange of funds with a bank in England. In the West, we are very familiar with these scams but, of course, some people still become victims of these criminals.
Here are some tips:
1. Don't discuss money with anyone you don't know.
2. Don't accept messages from strangers who tell you that they have seen your profile and are very interested in you.
3. Don't ship anything to anyone who insists on arranging complicated shipping arrangements that involve the transfer of funds from a bank in England.
4. Remember this: If something sounds too good to be true, then it is too good to be true.
If you have questions or comments, please send me a message. Thanks for reading!
