Nigerian 419 Scammers Using Snail Mail Again.

A Happy New Year to one & all.

Yesterday I received an invitation to share in $33,500,000, but the invite came in an envelope not email. It's been at least 10 years since a similar missive came my way, & in that case the envelope bore a colour-photocopied Nigerian 'stamp' with sewing-machine perfs, postmarked from Ghana (I never did pursue that anomaly).

Here's the evidence

Envelope


Correspondence


Indica


Royal Mail


Mail Depot marking


You'll note the grammar of the correspondence is very good, no 'Salutations' or 'Greetings'. It's a form letter, it has our name & address in the top left corner just right for the window envelope (where they got that from I would REALLY like to know), & the recently deceased millionaire, by a strange coincidence, bears my fairly unusual Polish surname.

What's interesting for us is the printing on the envelope, I assume it's computor ink-jet printing, quite jagged around the edges under magnification. It's gone through the mail - a Postal Forgery! I am excited. The mail depot markings are quite orange BTW, the scan has lightened them somewhat.

Assuming that this did come from Britain, anyone know what the Royal Mail authorities do about postal forgeries. Are they active in hunting down & prosecuting perpetrators? What about legitimate pre-printed indicas, are there means in place to show that they are real? (phosphor printing?)

Finally, does anyone have a direct email for reporting fraud of this nature? I've done a quick Google & notice that folks who go via the normal 'Contact Us' channels wind up with generic replies. Or is it just not worth the bother.

If anyone collects this sort of stuff I'm quite willing to pass it on, I'll keep it but it will only gather dust in some unseen portion of my stamp den. Now if it where only from Poland...

So, what are you going to do with all that money?



Seriously though, I would keep all that. A hundred years from now it will be a rare item.

Theron.

I had a couple of similar items a year or so ago. Like you, I have a fairly unusual surname - perhaps that's what attracts the scammers' attention. The English wasn't as good, and my contact was in China. My name and address were probably picked up from the electoral roll. Unlike you, I didn't do the detective work on the postmark - just noted the oddness of Royal Mail's being used for scamming!

It certainly is an interesting item, but I cant see the sewing machine perforations however?

edit:

Just a side thought here- if you was to respond to this it is likely that you would be directed to send some ungodly amount of money to an address in Africa or something? They only need one or two gullible people to respond and comply with their instructions to make it well worth their while to mass produce fake and fraudulent postal stationery so it's a "no-brainer" here...it's a total rip-off dude. lol Unfortunately, a lot of these are taken seriously and the people rarely recoup their losses. Sad.