$150,000 in the mail

[JamesVincent]

I recently got a message on Facebook from someone I vaguely knew a few years ago, about a decade or so ago. The messages started out normal enough, "Hey, how you been?', "Everything good?", etc. Within a few messages they changed to "Have you heard the great news?". Now, for a little backstory, I "knew" this person when he was a drummer for a band that had several friends in it. He is actually pretty famous in musician world so I'm not gonna bring up his name. Initially I thought maybe he was letting me know that they were restarting the band, which has been talked about. Nope.

It's all about the compensation program,did you hear them yet?

I then thought that maybe this great guy had been pulled into the MLM wormhole and I kinda lost interest. About a week or so later I sent him a message asking if he had made it through a storm that had passed through his area. Message got read but no answer. Then a week or so later I get:

I mean the sum of $150,000 in cash that was donated by Facebook and the International Monetary Fund, did you get yours too?

Dafuq.

So I went through and checked online and found:

We would like to bring to the notice of the general public that several variants of financial scam letters purporting to be sanctioned by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or authored by high ranking IMF officials are currently in circulation, and may appear on official letterhead containing the IMF logo. The scam letters instruct potential victims to contact the IMF for issuance of a “Certificate of International Capital Transfer” or other forms of approval to enable them to receive large sums of monies as beneficiaries. The contact e-mail information is always bogus and unsuspecting individuals are then requested to send their personal banking details, which the scammers utilize for their fraudulent activities.

https://www.imf.org/external/scams.htm

Apparently this scam has existed in one form or another for quite awhile. I found articles on it going back to 2015. I'm not sure what's going on with this person, whether or not his Facebook was hacked since Facebook was the only way I had to contact him. This is his legitimate Facebook, I've been friends with him for a few years and the updates and info on it were all about his musical career. I've sent a couple of messages to mutual friends but have yet to hear back.

The reason I added it to the Advance Fee Fraud sub is that apparently the scam follows the Nigerian Prince form, you have to send a "reserving fee" ahead of time and that's usually when you lose contact.

[eric]

I'm not sure what's going on with this person, whether or not his Facebook was hacked since Facebook was the only way I had to contact him. This is his legitimate Facebook, I've been friends with him for a few years and the updates and info on it were all about his musical career. I've sent a couple of messages to mutual friends but have yet to hear back.

It's not really a hack, it's simply identity fraud. When setting up a new facebook account you can select a display name that is the same as your target. Just copypasta all the pertinent personal info, snag a few of his photos, and to all appearances you're him. About the only way to detect this type of fraud if you're a novice is to check their friends list. Having a large number of unexplained friends from African countries or SE Asia is usually a good tell. One chap I know from 40 years ago must be popular with scammers - he has a good dozen fraudulent identities that keep sending me friends requests.

[JamesVincent]

No, it's the same profile I added almost 10 years ago. The mutual friends I mentioned are still mutual Facebook friends and well over 1k photos, one with me included during the heyday of the band I mentioned a decade ago. It's definitely his profile. The biggest thing making me think it was hacked is it hasn't been active in a couple years. That and, if memory serves, he wasn't a "money" person. Some of the things he had done in the past had made him wealthy enough that the $150k would have been just another good royalty check.

[The Observer]

The same thing happened to me as well. Unfortunately for the scammer, the friend's account they stole hadn't been used in quite a while; my friend had lost interest in Facebooking and told me he was dropping out. So for me to suddenly receive a message from him raised a lot of suspicion. After getting through the initial "how have you been doing?" exchange, the scammer then hit me with a similar come-on, asking if I heard about this "new program for investing?"

I ignored his question and just asked him "How are the kids doing?" He answered back with "great" or "fine" and went back to pushing his scam script about the "new program." I just told him at that point he was not my friend and was obviously involved in some kind of fraud. He immediately gave up and moved on.

Thank goodness my friend never had kids.

[Pottapaug1938]

JamesVincent said:

The reason I added it to the Advance Fee Fraud sub is that apparently the scam follows the Nigerian Prince form, you have to send a "reserving fee" ahead of time and that's usually when you lose contact.

When I reply that they can simply deduct the fee in question from my loot, they get rather testy with me.