Nigerian 419 Scam: Impersonating Kofi Annan

I can't believe I just got this email! I have already received an email from the perpetrators of the Nigerian Scam pretending to be the FBI, which made me laugh more than anything else, but this is really over the top!

The subject line of the last email I got is : "(UNITED NATIONS)" and they have even included a photograph of Kofi Annan in their message! I am completely speechless so I will just quote what they wrote:

ZENITH BANK COMPENSATION UNIT, IN AFFILIATION WITH THE UNITED NATION.

ATTN:Sir/Madam,
How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?,You may not understand why this mail came to you.

We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with the former secretary to the UNITED NATIONS.

This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$ 500,000,00 This includes every foriegn contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems etc.

We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed.

Therefore, we are happy to inform you that an arrangement has perfectly been concluded to effect your payment as soon as possible in our bid to be transparent.

However, it is our pleasure to inform you that your ATM Card Number; 5490 9957 6302 4525 has been approved and upgraded in your favor.

Meanwhile, your Secret Pin Number will be available as soon as you confirm to us the receipt of your ATM CARD.

The ATM Card Value is $500,000 USD Only. You are advised that a maximum withdrawal value of US$10,000.00 is permitted daily.

And we are duly inter-switched and you can make withdrawal in any location of the ATM Center of your choice/nearest to you any where in the world.
We have also concluded delivery arrangement with our accredited courier service Company to oversee the delivery of the ATM Card to you without any further delay.

So you are hereby advice to forward to this office Director ATM SWIFT CARD Department Therefore, you should send him your full Name and telephone number/your correct mailing address where you want him to send the ATM to you.

Conatct Mr. Jim Ovia immediately for your ATM SWIFT CARD:

Person to Contact Mr. Jim Ovia
Email: contactzenithjimovia1@gmail.com

Thanks and God bless you and your family. Hoping to hear from you as soon as you receive your ATM.

Making the world a better place

Regards,
Mr. Kofi Anan
Former Secretary (UNITED NATIONS).

Spotting the clues that confirm that this is indeed a scam has become a game by now: have you spotted the spelling mistakes? I found 4, including "Annan" spelled with only one "n" in the signature! Can you find more?

What about the contact email address ending with gmail? Don't you think the United Nations would use a more professional one (perhaps something ending with @unitednations, @unations, @un...) instead of a cheap looking one like this?

Impersonating respected authorities (or any one else for that matter) in the attempt of defrauding people is a crime punished by law and I believe that just sending those emails will get the scammers behind bar, if they ever get caught. In order to help the authorities fight against crimes like these, when you get an email that you know is a scam, forward it to reportphishing@antiphishing.org (for more information, look up the APWG website, don't just take my word for it). If you have been the victim of a scam, go to IC3 and follow their instructions for filing a complaint.

If you are still not convinced that you are the target of scammers when you get an email like this and are tempted to follow the given instructions, be aware that this can be very dangerous. If you don't believe me, here is a link to a forum entirely dedicated to the Nigerian 419 scam, where you can find examples of what happened to some of the victims: The Dangers of Nigerian 419 Fraud. Pretty scary, don't you think?

How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with Wordpress: E-book Review

As you may already know if you are familiar with Caroline Middlebrook's blog, she has just released her first e-book: How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with Wordpress. This is a free e-book, so even though it is about Wordpress and not Blogger, I downloaded it and here is what I think about it:

This is a tutorial that takes you through all the steps from getting and installing Wordpress to turning your Wordpress blog into a website using static pages, getting the right content for your pages and monetizing it using Adsense and anything else you see fit.

The bulk of this ebook concentrates on the technicalities of setting up Wordpress and getting your site live; simple and detailed explanations make it easy to understand, so even if you don't know the first thing about web hosting, scripts or tranferring files (I don't!), you should have no problems setting up your niche sites if you follow the instructions carefully.

All the links that are needed in order to succeed in the implementation of How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with Wordpress are included; the only thing I thought was missing was a list of links to free private label rights articles, as this is what Caroline suggests you can use for the content of your site (of course, if you decide to use these, you must edit them or better still, write your own articles from scratch to avoid duplicate content), but even without this (anyone with half a brain can look up "free private label rights articles" on the Internet), it is a great read and if I had more time, I would probably give this a go.

Even though this is about Wordpress and Caroline stresses the fact that this is not an e-book about making money, the information it contains should enable anybody to make money, not necessarily using Wordpress or Adsense.

How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with Wordpress is free, get it here!

A Simple Way to Make Money with a Squidoo Lens

When I first started to use the Internet to make money, I suffered from Information Overload: so many money-making ideas being thrown at me but no real plan on how use most of these in my advantage. I started too many projects without really knowing where I was going; I read a lot of articles saying that Squidoo was a good way to make money online so I created a Squidoo lens.

This was about 3 months ago; my Squidoo lens has a link to this blog, probably another one to my website and I really can't remember what else: I actually can't even remember its url address!

A few weeks ago, another Associated Content producer sent me a message asking me if she could use the RSS of my articles to put on her Squidoo lens. Naturally I was very curious so I went and took a good look at it: it is called Know It All Moms and contains a lot of advice on children, parenting, homeschooling, women's health and money (that's where I come in).

The interesting thing about this Squidoo lens is that it doesn't require much maintenance; there is an introduction followed by the RSS of Lisa Carey's own Associated Content articles, plus a few other RSSs, so the updating of her lens is being done automatically.

Since most Associated Content producers write on a lot of different topics, I wouldn't really recommend using RSSs, as this means you could get an article on the American election thrown in the middle of parenting articles, so selecting individual articles would be a safer bet. Another option would be to add the RSSs of different blogs, always with prior owner's consent of course. Using RSSs is different from copying whole articles, so there is no risk of being penalised by Google for using duplicate content.

One very positive thing about Lisa's lens is that it helps not only her own articles, but also other people's articles to get more page views, which means more money. She also uses Adsense and Amazon in order to earn money from her Squidoo lens.

This gave me a totally new outlook on Squidoo and how to make money from it and I think I might try another shot at it.

Participate and Host Blog Carnivals to Increase your Blog's Exposure

I have heard a lot about Blog Carnivals but until recently I didn't really know what they were and how eactly they could increase a blog's exposure, so I visited Blog Carnival, a website were you can find all kinds of Blog Carnivals on any topic.

Participating in a Blog Carnival is much easier than I thought: all I had to do after accessing the website, was find a carnival with a topic related to my blog, submit one of my blog posts accompanied from a short description and I was finished!

Being a Blog Carnival host requires a bit more work, as the host must input all the information submitted to the carnival in one blog post at a specified date, but a carnival host benefits from more traffic as well, as the carnival participants will want to check that their posts are featured, and if advertised well enough, the carnival should attract new visitors that are eager to discover new blogs.

When participating in a blog carnival, bloggers should make sure that they submit one of their best blog posts; the post must have a title that makes people want to read. A blog carnival can feature a lot of articles written by different bloggers and not many will go trough the process of reading them all so your titlemust really make you stand out from the crowd if you want to get the exposure, and not just benefit from one more link in a blog.

My first blog carnival submission is The Magic Formula to Make Money Online from Blogs and it features today on Web Dosh. I have submitted the same blog post to another carnival that will be published on March 1st, 2008 on Lead Inspectors.

Check out the new widget on the sidebar for the next Blog Carnivals, or if you would like more information on Blog Carnivals, visit Blog Carnival.

The Importance of Writing a Good Blog Post Title

There are huge mistakes a blogger can make and I have just made one of them! Any guesses yet? Well, last Saturday I wrote a post and as I could not think of a catchy title to put on it at first so I just went and wrote the post, hit the preview button to check how it looked, and since it looked fine to me, I just went and published it but I forgot to put a title on it!

While this is not a tragedy in itself, not putting a title on a blog's post means that:
1- It looks like you are forcing your visitors to read your entire post before they know what you are talking about and unless they are regular visitors of your blog, most will not bother (expecially if the post is very long);
2- This unnamed blog post will be harder to find by search engines, which means that surfers looking for a particular topic might key in a word or set of words in their toolbar, and if these are words that should have been in your title, chances are these surfers will not reach your post;
3- If you are familiar with the CommentLuv plugin, you will know that when you comment on a blog using this, your last blog post will not appear (as I have recently discovered);

This brings me to the importance of choosing the right titles for your blog posts or articles; in my view, the main idea is that you should write catchy titles (but not too cheesy: I could never really trust a Make $1000 a Day title), specific enough to come out high enough in an Internet search, but not too specific: just enough to attract a broad enough audience that will not hit the back button as soon as they realise that they have no interest in your topic. If you would like to learn more about writing good titles for your blog posts or articles, you should read 8 Ways of Creating Compelling Blog Post Titles. This article was written a little while ago, but it does what it says on the tin, and that is the point of a good blog post title

I know I could have edited my post and added a title but when I realised my omission, my post had been live for at least 24 hours so I didn't bother; if I did, I would probably have called it something like: Increase Your Chances of Visitors Clicking Your Affiliate Links (which is a bit too long anyway;-).

Well, at least, my mistake gave me an idea for a brand new post so I can't complain about this!

I read a very inspiring post yesterday called Persuasion Tactics: Two Ways to Improve Conversions for Your Website. In this post, Dosh Dosh wrote about some techniques that can be used to make your visitors click on links.

I am not going to rehash his post, but one idea sprang to my mind as I was reading: supposing you are an affiliate, if you write an article (using the methods highlighted in Persuasion Tactics... or not), talking about two products, praising one and putting the other one down, what do you think will happen?

I may not have studied marketing extensively, but my gut feeling says that the readers may feel that the first product could be a good buy and click on that link, as the fact that you are not pushing people to buy the second product tells them that you are an honest person and this may entrust them that little bit more to your opinions.

Of course, some may click on the other link (Little Miss Contrary rings a bell here), maybe by curiosity and decide to buy that second product instead, which doesn't matter since you are also an affiliate of this one. Of course, whether they will buy or not is the readers' own decisions but prompting them to click is part of the battle!

Don't Be Fooled by Promises of Love, Money and Happiness

A few weeks ago, I shared on this blog an email I had received from a clairvoyant, which predicted me a positive change of luck at 8.00 PM on January 29th of 2008.

I suppose she meant to say that if I sent her a payment, she would make sure that my life would be filled with more Love, Money and Happiness; of course I did not send any payment, as I don't believe in such so-called "predictions".

What happened in my life on 29th January 2008, is that I had to rush my youngest daughter to the hospital as she developped a rash that turned out to be benign but was really worrying at the time, since it looked similar to a meningitis symptom. Needless to say I didn't have anytime for thoughts of Money or finding Love.

Both my children are now perfectly healthy, which they were already before the "prediction" and my situation is exactly the same as it was immediately before January 29th.

Would anything have been different if I had paid the requested amount of money? I think I can safely answer no. I have my children, a roof over our heads and enough money to get by without having to struggle too much. I am not a millionaire, but I would rather be "poor" with my healthy children than a millionaire alone.

Don't be fooled by promises of Love, Money and Happiness: some clairvoyants may be genuinely gifted but I don't believe you will find any of these sending weekly or monthly email newsletters to thousands of people they have never even met.

However desperate you are, don't ever pay someone to make your dreams come true. Everyone has the power to make things happen and it would be very foolish to rely on strangers and expect them to better your life. These are just shameless individuals trying to make money from people's unhappiness and whenever I come accross them, I can visualise a word in my mind: that word is "SCAM". (Hey, maybe I have a claivoyance gift too!).