How stupid can people be

As I'm laid up at the moment I've taken up a fun new hobby of pissing off people who send out "419" - also known as "advance fee fraud" - emails. You know the ones that you get where some twat pretending to be the wife of some dickcheese ex president of some shithole African swamp has umpty million dollars in dodgy blood diamonds she needs your help in smuggling out of the country.

Like you I've normally just junked these when the get through the spam filters but with nothing better to do and inspired by sites like TheScamBaiter and 419Eater I thought I would open an account on gmail and play the part of a slightly dippy old granny who is bemused that a former head of state's wife would choose an Ilkley church-going grandmother with a fondness for baking rock buns for her neighbours to be the recipient of several squillion dollars in bent oil revenues.

If I was stunned that anyone would even answer these emails before I am even more stunned now that after two or three responses from the perpetrators that anyone ever gets as far as the "money shot" where the perps ask for a large wedge of cash to be sent by money transfer. As an example at the moment I have a "lawyer" called Richard Crook who can barely string a sentence together in English despite having sent me a scan of a UK passport depicting a middle aged white guy and having chambers in what a Google search reveals is a TK Maxx outlet on Oxford St and as proof of the huge sums awaiting me says he is going to the high court in London to lodge an affidavit and then as proof sends me something from a magistrates court from Accrington, a small town in Lancashire noted for a joke football team and being the birthplace of a certain prog rocker who really, really wanted to be an elf called Jon Anderson.

To be honest my gut feeling is that anyone falling for this hogwash deserves everything they get. But I realise that there are genuinely frail, desperate and dippy grannies from West Yorkshire towns out there who are not savvy enough to see through the bullshit and who think that Miriam Abachas' millions might just save then from a life on NuLabour's hand to mouth breadline and keep them out of the state's piss stinking nursing home. So if me tapping away on my PC and sending 20Mb blank PDF documents to these bastards keeps them from a genuine granny then so much the better.

Incidentally, I have this bridge in London for sale if anyone is interested?

Dans La Merde, encore

Glad that I'm not working for a certain French bank right now.

French bank Societe Generale says it has uncovered "massive" fraud by a Paris-based trader which resulted in a loss of 4.9bn euros ($7.1bn; £3.7bn)

Ooopsie... that's going to result in a large number of very disappointed cheese-eating surrender monkeys come le jour de bonus

So what has our new Nicolas Leeson done to lose so much money? Well from what I can gather from the newswires pretty much the same thing as Nicky boy did in Singapore which brought Barings down and that is writing naked forward contracts. Basically (and simplifying a lot) what he's done is write a contract back in 2007 saying that he's going to buy 100,000 shares in Merde Inc from me at 5 Euros a share on settlement day, January 18th 2008. Now he's betting that the share price for Merde will be above that come the big day, we do our deal and he sells the shares for a profit. Now by writing the contract and selling it he makes a small premium but is now on the hook for a shitload of cash come expiry time. No problem if the stock markets are rising but then all those pesky yanks suddenly couldn't pay their mortgages any more and defaulted with the result that shares in Merde Inc were, well, down the toilette

Of course you would have thought that after the Leeson fiasco there would not be a single bank that would not have reviewed what happened, review and where necessary tightened processes and controls. I was working for a certain American investment bank at the time (the one with the biggest testicles in an organization's logo incidentally) and they sure as hell did; and very nicely I did out of it too with a big fat bonus for working on that project.

I guess over at Soc Gen they just did that stupid Gallic shoulder shrug and went off for a 3 hour lunch.

Won't be having Chateau Lafite with lunch tomorrow I'll wager.

The most incompetent phishing attempt in the world, ever!

From my gmail account this morning. Notice the cunning use of an AOL address...

Dear Central Bank account holder,

Because of several failed sign on attempts to you online account, your Central Bank account features have been restricted as of the time of this notification. For more account information, to restore your account features or make an online payment, you must contact us at
http://www.aol.com/redir.adp?_e_t=ap&_a_v=2.0& a_i=100124311x1116601028x1077500809&_url=http://64.26.156.92/icons/update/personal/Home/index.php

This message is for information purposes only.

Please understand that we cannot respond to individual messages through this email address. It is not secure and should not be used for credit card account related questions.

To restore your Central Online Banking features, please follow these steps:

1. Contact us at http://www.aol.com/redir.adp?_e_t=ap&_a_v=2.0&_a_i=100124311x1116601028x1077500809&_url=http://64.26.156.92/icons/update/personal/Home/index.php
2. Sign on to your online banking account and verify your Account Features

After you submitted your message, check for a response within 48 hours. Just return to the Write to Customer Care section and select View/Update Message link.



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... priceless!