Myspace Warning

This was sent to me as an email by a member of the Mailing List. I’ve reproduced his email in full as a warning to others.

Thanks for the advice. I have another scam I think your readers might like hearing about, especially the young internet savvy ones. I recently joined Myspace in hopes of creating a profile page that I could like to other sites I have. In the process I would get invited to be friends with all kinds of people who would interact with me through the Myspace site. However, I also began getting quite a few request for correspondence from women who were members, but who had not developed their site at all. There was several thing in common with each of these women. They all were from southern U.S. states, but were currently in Nigeria. They all had dead parents. They were all under 30 years of age and very good looking. Most importantly all of the discouraged corresponding through Myspace, but preferred our emailing or chatting via their yahoo accounts. They all had yahoo.

I responded to a couple of them but was discouraged immediately by their writing skills. It seemed as if they were undereducated for their age or foreign. But they would not admit anything personal. All they wanted to assure me of within the second email is that they were looking a guy like me. I decided to tell them to Scram. One woman persisted and after she sent me three more pictures (a number they all seem content to send of themselves) I continued writing her. I was curious as to what she wanted. Like the others she wanted to stake claims to a relationship asap. And she wanted to assure me that she would be returning home to America soon so that we could be together. Once I agreed that it would be great to meet her she then tried to get me to agree to her moving here to my hometown and allowing her to move in with me. I said no. Then the real reasons started coming out after I told her she was foolish for trying to move in with someone she had not met. She needed me to send her money to ship her luggage here. And she wanted me to look after the luggage until she came here and could move in. Note here I had already told her I would not allow her to live here, but she seemed to be ignoring any questions or requirements I laid down. Eventually she wrote back that she needed my address to give to a security company that will ship her luggage right away. In the meantime she had already paid a third of the freight fee and needed me to cover the remainder—sum of 560 pounds. The money had to be paid in cash by wire via Western Union. She contine to use love, sex, the future together to sway me into sending the fee to an African, or Nigerian I’ll presume who was the Mgr. of the security shipping company, but in viewing her Certificate of Deposit it appeared to be spontaneously written and unprofessional since it was done by email without a template or spellcheck.