No sex in this post, just a funny/sad fraud spam from this morning’s email.

Usually I delete these — the ones that make it through my filters — based on the subject line alone, and this one would have been no challenge to do the same. The subject?

They say you can’t really run a good con on an honest person, and I guess this is proof. Not only is an honest person not going to be buying gold from email strangers, but the math on this one pretty much excludes response by anybody who might actually be interested in buying one hundred and seventy six kilograms of gold.

176kg of gold is, rounding up, 5659 troy ounces. At today’s gold price per Yahoo finance ($1014 ish per ounce [subsequent edit: more like $1390, see comments, all my numbers are significantly low because of this]) we are talking in the neighborhood of $5.7 million worth of gold. So it’s clear at a glance that this email is not offering a legitimate proposal. Nobody does that kind of business by cold email — NOBODY.

You’d have to be literally too stupid to breathe, to even open that email with purchase in mind. But if you’re just dumb enough to be curious who has 176kg of gold, and criminal enough to wonder whether they could be somehow relieved of it: hello sucker!

The attached email, of course, offers an advanced-payment scheme. Prepay six percent, and then by cumbersome miracles, the gold will be delivered to your “factory”, after which you can attempt to screw us poor hard-working African rubes out of the rest of our money, while you laugh about having “bought” $5.7 mill worth of gold for only $340,000:

Good morning dear sir,
dear i send you this proposal business to seek your partnership.
In fact, i represented a group of villagers ( extractors)in MALI
our speciality is to collect gold in dust( AU ) and find buyers
in europe ,asia and america.
dear sir, we have now in our office 176 kg of yellow gold if you are
interrest by this proposal this is the caracteristic of the product
Nature : Gold powder
quantity : 176 kg
Quality : 22 +karat
Purity : 97 %
Origin : MALI
we will discuss the price after your answer.

Dear sir this how we procced when we have a buyer:
1- the buyer come down in MALI to verify the gold,
after verify we make an agreement between the buyer and us
with the buyer we make all the certificates on his name and adress
for the exportation.
so the buyer pay 6 % of the total value there , and one of our
representative go with the buyer to his address and to finalyse the
payment.
2- if the buyer can’t come down in africa ,he send us all his details
and his pasport copy
he write us and aggrement and send us , we make certificates and
all documents by
the buyer name and one of our representative go with the gold to
his adress .
on his adress the buyer send the gold on the factory and verify all
and proceed to the payment.
3- if we have a contact we find us a buyer we will discuss with him
about his perrcentage
after selling.But he will assist during the proccess.
thank you.

The guy greedy and dumb enough to fall for this one? He’s gonna have the trip of a lifetime on his visit to Mali, I tell you what.