Friday, July 11, 2008

Bird Flu?

Boggle does the mind:

Hope fine, My name is M.MOUNIR working with AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK (ADB) OUAGADOUGOU BURKINA-FASO. During our periodic auditing this year, I discovered a dormant accounts with holding balance of (£5,000.000.00) {Five million British Pounds Starlings} this account has not been operated for the past years. As at this moment, I am constrained to issue more details about this business until your response is received.


My emphasis :)  Why do English plurals seem to be such a problem for 419ers?  Are they generally a problem for English speakers from African countries?  Not from my limited experience but ...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What makes you think this came from an African country? It's an obvious phish, or scam, designed to part fools from their money, and could presumably have come from anywhere. However, I agree that Nigeria is statistically the likeliest country of origin...

Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/

Surreptitious Evil said...

Yes, it is an obvious scam - a 419 or, technically, an "advanced fee fraud." The sender is probably African (and from that Nigerian) or from the Former Soviet Union (although their English tends to be better if somewhat trans-Atlantic in spelling.)

Please note that the initial comment was "Why do English plurals seem to be such a problem for 419ers?" This is a general reflection on standard of English and the consistent mistakes in this variety of scam emails.

My limited experience of native African speakers of English (mostly from Uganda and Zimbabwe) is that I hadn't seen the plural form as a particularly common error.

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