From the desk of Mr. Hillary Mensah, Branch Manager Eco Bank Kumasi Branch Ghana

This is the first in my series ‘replying the scammers’ – just starting today, right now.

My name for this series will be FaceOchu Amos. ‘Face‘ from Facebook; ‘Ochu‘ from Pokemon name generator, besides it sounds Nigerian, so I can tell the scammer that I’m right here in Nigeria and the deal can pull through quickly) and ‘Amos‘ – the saintly Flavor.

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Scammers email:

From: Mr. Hillary Mensah <mensaah0985u975@msn.com>
Subject: URGENT   RESPONSE
To:
Date: Friday, January 30, 2009, 10:17 PM
FROM THE DESK OF MR.HILLARY MENSAH
BRANCH MANAGER ECO BANK
KUMASI BRANCH GHANA.

Dear Friend,

My name is Mr.Hillary Mensah, I am the branch manager of  the Eco Bank Kumasi branch Ghana. I got your information during my search through the Internet. I am 41years of age and married with 3 lovely kids. It may interest you to hear that I am a man of peace and I don’t want problem, but I do not know how you will feel about this because you may have double mind. But I am telling you that this is real and you are not going to regret after doing this transaction with me. I only hope that we can assist each other. But if you don’t want this business offer kindly forget it and I will not contact you again. I have packaged a financial transaction that will benefit both of us, as the regional manager of the Eco Bank; it is my duty to send in a financial report to my head office in the capital city
(Accra-Ghana) at the end of each year. On the course of the last year 2008 end of last year report, I discovered that my branch in which I am the manager made three million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar [3, 750.000.00] which my head office is not aware of it and will never be aware of.

I have since place this fund on what we call SUSPENSE ACCOUNT without any beneficiary. As an official of the bank
I can not be directly connected to this fund, so this informed me of contacting you for us to work, so that you
can assist and receive this fund into your bank account for us to SHARE. Mean While you will have 35% of the total fund, Note there are practically no risk involved, it will be bank to bank transfer, all I need from you is to stand claim as the original depositor of this fund who made the deposit with our branch so that my Head office can order the
transfer to your designated bank account. If you accept this offer to work with me, I will appreciate it very much as
soon as I receive your response I will give you details on how we can achieve it successfully.

Please contact me with this email
address:(hillarymensah00@live.com)

Best Regards,
Mr.Hillary Mensah.

FaceOchu replies:

Dear Hillary

Thank you for your email. I was actually expecting an email from Mr. Hillary Clinton the former President of the United States of America, who promised to send me details of a business proposal similar to what you have expressed in your email.

Please note, I am very much interested in your business offer, and would want to do business with you. In fact, I can say its God that is bringing both of us together. You see, I also work in the Lagos-state branch of Eco Bank, so I believe the business will be successful.

You mean the SUSPENSE ACCOUNT does not have a beneficiary yet? I watched the movie when it debutted in 1964 and its director Friz Freleng was a good friend of mine. I don’t know if he’s still alive but the movie is still online here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0152705/

Yes I have a bank account. You are so generous, 35% of the entire amount will be all that I need. Yes, I would like to accept your offer. Please give me details on how you and I can achieve this business successfully.

warm regards,
FaceOchu Amos.

replying the scammers

I am following in the footsteps of David who made the first reply to my post titled: scam mails in reverse psychology. I had fun reading through his posts and thought of catching some fun myself.

Here we go:

First, I googled for a random name generator and created a specialized name ‘pokemon’ name with a Christian flavor: Amos.  So here, lets start replying the spammers and see if they’ll talk back.

The correspondence will be posted for all to see.

 

From Facebook to 9jabook, where is the originality, part2

P.S: The following was not premeditated:

Without any particular reason, rather than type the URL for this weblog straight into my address bar, I decided to do a google-search. If you clicked on the previous google-search link, scroll down and you’ll see the image below:

For one second, I remembered the sentence circled in red above, that it has to do with a previous post I did titled: from facebook to 9jabook, where is the originality, about the guys at 9jabook.com. The post, till date has generated 14-comments, the first couple of which was from one Mr. Frank Adeche Webbaba, who sounded like the owner of 9jabook, and who saw my post as a complete criticism of his website. He used the opportunity to diss me, not with a few harsh words. He so much wanted me to take off the post, and didn’t mind calling me many names in the process.

Then one Mr. Abi John came long to say:

Abi John said

January 3, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Hi

Can you kindly delete this post from your blog .Frank Adeche is not a representative of our site.Kindly remove all references to 9jabook .regards Abi Balogun Webmaster.9jabook.com

Abi John later added:

Abi John said

January 7, 2009 at 4:04 pm
hi Mr Admin

Thanks for your email i do run the site . As for proof you need goto 9jabook and look for this profile.

http://www.9jabook.com/profile/abibalogun it is under the title weboga drop a post there and i will reply it .Frank is a member of the site but not an official representative.i can understand his reactions to your criticisms but they are in no way solicited or requested from ourselves or vice versa.The internet is an anonymous place where people think they can say what they like and sometimes no one is wrong .Our rights as an entity request that you put these posts down .It is affecting our SEO rankings on google .

Also

thanks for your comments . right now we are doing a focus on originality on our website and are featuring the artise Faze as our theme mascot check it out !.When we need a review we will officially ask you .You guys are doing a great Job ! i must say but i am not too impressed with your darkish criticisms. too much simon cowell .lol ! We are always trying our best to improve our game and please all of you out there . Thanks !

Anyway, the post still remains, and it will. Since then I had a hunch that Abi John and Frank Adeche were one and the same person/s.

Back to my google-search results of ‘naijatechtalk’. I decided to check out the link (red circled screen capture above) and lo, it is a wordpress weblog: http://9jabook.wordpress.com, with title 9jabook’s weblog.

I read through the latest post titled: 9jabook rvp project, nice and interesting idea indeed, but was surprised to find Frank Adeche’s email address at the end of the post. Screen-cap below (just in case the blog is taken down).

where am I going with all these?

nowhere, but just to say that:

• an unofficial member of 9jabook, Frank Adeche, like the rest of us members, is blogging about the projects of the whole team, with reference to himself. The project is his brainchild, no problem with that, so lets give it up for him: clap, clap, clap.
• All the posts on the weblog were made by 9jabook(username), and on the same date January26th, 2009 (so lets welcome 9jabook’s new weblog).
• And while there is another post referring users to a 9jabook gmail address, the language-tense in all the posts uses the first person singular (I), ok, lets assume its only one person blogging, not two. Who then is Abi John and who is Frank Adeche. I think my hunch struck a cord? or?this is regardless of different profiles in 9jabook for the above-mentioned names?……na naija we dey, abi? anything can happen.

Leaving their wordpress weblog alone, I went somewhere else:

I also discovered that one of the websites in the 9jabook.com group is 9janews.com(the amebo, YABBIS and tafia site). Great idea, congratulations, at last a place for fresh Nigerian Amebos and YABBIS.

So I went reading, post by post, wondering why all the text were appeared with ‘one-kin’ formatting, nothing to show that something was edited anywhere etc., I scrolled on to the next set of posts and found my original post, a line of which drew me off my google-search into all that I’ve been talking about in this post, this early morning.

My post which drew sparks from Frank Adeche was just copy pasted and renamed: 9jabook the hottest soxl network in 9ja right now. Nice initiative hey!!! What could be worse. Anyway, since 9janews is about amebo, YABBIS and tafia, their actions are condoned.

I just completed an early morning merry go around really, who was talking about originality?

 

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