A bizarre email scam has been doing the rounds recently that claims the First Lady, Melania Trump, has $20,000,000 waiting for you.
Well, providing you first send all your personal information via email and fork out $180. Of course.
Check out this email below –
Our more weary readers will be well aware that this is an advance fee scam – dubbed “Nigerian” scams – where criminals promise the victim a large payout, but first request much smaller payouts from the victim. And when the victim forks out the money, the scammers disappear, along with the promise of unlimited riches.
Traditionally, such scams claim to come from Nigerian princes or lawyers. However thousands of different templates to this notorious scam have been identified over the years, but the general modus operandi remains largely the same.
In this case, according to the email, Melania Trump is holding on to a cool $20 million that has your name on it – money that has apparently come from the government of the West Africa Benin Republic, for reasons unknown.
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The email immediately requests the recipient pay $180 in order to retrieve the funds. This is actually quite unusual, since these types of scammers don’t usually reveal the unpleasant surprise that they expect the victim to first hand over money until at least a few emails have been exchanged between scammer and victim.
This is the first scam pretending to come from the current First Lady, at least that we’re aware of. Back in 2012, then-First Lady Michelle Obama was used in a very similar scam, only this time the scammers were claiming Michelle was operating a victim compensation scheme and wanted to hand you $20 million (again) as a compensation fund.
We’re not really sure how many people fall for these incredibly obvious scams. But we’ve previously discussed these types of schemes and how scammers use the utter absurdity of them to their advantage (to weed out the skeptical and lure in the vulnerable from the outset, basically.) You can read that article here.
In the meantime, no, the White House doesn’t want to give you $20 million, so please don’t send them any of your details and certainly none of your money.
