The widow of rich man promises potential victims a fortune of $2.4 million

Sep 21, 2012 09:32 GMT  ·  By

A large majority of advance fee schemes, or 419 scams, involve Mr. Ali Bubba of the National Bank of Nigeria, or executives and diamond mine owners from other African countries. However, more recently, the scammers have changed their game to include the nationals of more developed countries.

Back in June, we saw a scam that purported to come from a Karen Shaw in New York. She wanted to donate her $10 million (7.6 million EUR) fortune to the needy.

An email that has been making the rounds for the past week or so, claims to originate from German national Mrs. Ulrike Stockfleth, the widow of a Mr. Roland Stockfleth who worked for the “Elf oil company” – presumably Elf Aquitaine of France.

“My name is Mrs Ulrike Stockfleth, I’m 57yrs old .I am a nationality Deutsch.I'm married to Deutsch (a German ) Mr. Roland Stockfleth who worked with ELF OIL COMPANY for thirty years before he died in the plane crash On 25th of July 2000 with other passengers aboard (sic),” the email reads.

“Immediately after the death of my husband, who has left me everything he worked for and because the doctors told me I will not live longer than some weeks because of my health, I decided to WILL/donate the sum of $2,400,000 to you for the good work of humanity, and also to help the motherless and less privilege and also for the assistance of the widows.”

She promises to give the recipient of the email all that money so that it can be used to “extend the good work to others.”

Similar to other schemes, once users respond to the email, they’ll be asked to transfer a fairly small amount of money to a shady bank account, the payment being needed to “unfreeze” the millions of dollars (or something like that).

As always, we advise users to ignore such offers, even if they appear to originate from individuals who reside in non-African countries.