Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

I expect you have had one of those charmingly mis-spelled and sub-literate letters, usually from Nigeria but sometimes from other African countries, promising to make you rich if you’ll just lend your name and bank account to transfer large amounts of money out of the writer’s country.

Anybody who tries it soon discovers their bank account has been cleaned out.

Yesterday I received one of these propositions with a new twist. It purports to come from somebody in Hong Kong who has the job of dealing with the estate of a Mr Branston who died intestate, with no discoverable relatives to inherit his £15 million. If the money is not distributed soon it will disappear forever to be shared out among the directors of the bank where it is lodged.

To prevent this tragedy happening the writer suggests I pose as a relative of the dead man, I will get a third of his estate. I suppose the scammer must have done some research and found that Branston is a fairly rare name.

At least the writer of this letter is literate; the only mistake he makes is to address me as Branston Francis Joseph, Chinese style where the family name comes first …or maybe that’s another cunning ploy to make himself look genuine

Often with these offers, I’m tempted to play games by sending false information and demanding they give proof of their identity. But perhaps not this time. Triads, tongs, etc.

There should be nobody left in the world to fall for this scam, but just in case your name is Throckmorton or Scrimgeour and you get news of an unknown stiff with a similar name in Hong Kong, don’t be tempted. Remember the financial health warning: ‘If it seems to good to be true, it is’.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.