The Email Beneficiary Scam
The email beneficiary scam is just another one of those email type scams, but recently the number of such scams are increasing. The similarity of this scam to the other email type scams is that they are after your money, and sometimes your personal information.
The email beneficiary scam is out there to take both your money and your personal information. This is how it usually works. You receive an email, and the person who sent it claims to be an officer of a huge company. It can either be from a commercial company, an insurance company, or even a government agency.
The email will start of by telling you that you have inherited a huge amount of money, in most cases the amount is in the region of millions. If they were mimicking a commercial company, they will claim that you have been chosen from a large amount of people, and you won a special competition (There might use many other different excuses), and you are entitled to that huge amount of money.
If they were mimicking an insurance agency, they will claim that someone from another country (most of the times it is a country in war) has died and after further investigating, they found out that you were related to him, and that you are entitled to his huge insurance compensation. If they were trying to mimic a government agency, they would claim that you have been selected for a special government compensation.
So basically, no matter what excuse they use, those email beneficiary scams will try to make it look as if you have just won a huge amount of money without ever doing anything. This part alone would be suspicious, so those scammers added more information. In most cases, right after informing you that of what you are entitled to, they will have a few long paragraphs talking about their company and the reputation it has.
The thing to remember is that all the information they provide here is true. Why? Because they were mimicking a real and large company. They are trying to make us believe that they are really from those company by providing lots of information about those companies.
As I have mentioned earlier, they are after both our money and our personal information. This is how they will achieve it. Right at the bottom of the email, they will ask you to send them your personal information so that they can process the release of your money. They will usually ask for your simple details at first, and after you actually send it to them, they will reply you and ask for more personal information. They will use a lot of excuses here, to make it seem like it is all a legit process.
Now they've got all your personal information. Next is the money. Now they will email you and claim that to release the money to you, you would have to pay a certain amount. The reason you need to pay them will vary, from insurance money, to tax to almost everything imaginable. Of course, they will claim that they can't deduct the fee directly from the money you are about to get due to legal restrictions.
And that is where the real danger from this scam comes. Usually, the amount that is promised to you is in the high millions, to the tens of millions. They will claim that because of the huge amount, the taxes and all the other excuses they will come up with, will bevery expensive. Most of them will ask you to pay them more than $10,000 to release the money to you.
After you send them the money, you will never hear from them ever again. Just like that, you've been scammed out of your money and your personal information. The real problem with the email beneficiary scam, is that although most people are wise enough to not pay them the fees, many people to provide their personal information to them. If you did pay, you know that you just lost a huge amount of money.
This is one of the methods that those scammers use to get information on people for their identity theft. While it may look simple, it is a really dangerous scam that can really pose a threat to us.
The Email Beneficiary Scam: Return to the Online Danger main page
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