After posing as African kings, online fraudsters surface as FBI

CHENNAI: Gone are the days when one would receive an e-mail from a widow or heir of an African king promising a bounty in exchange for an initial payment of a few thousand dollars. The latest avatar donned by the online scamsters might force one to fall in the trap with senders introducing themselves as sleuths of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
This is also a type of what is known as the advanced fee scam, where fraudsters promise a huge sum of money for which an initial payment of few lakhs would have to be made.
Recently circulated e-mails show that the scamsters pose as sleuths of the counter-terrorism and cyber crime division of the FBI, warning the reader that they have been transacting with impostors and fraudsters.
The mails also assure the receiver of the mails that their payment from lottery or gambling or inheritance was safe and could be released with prior approval from USA's ministry of finance. But for that, they would have to make an initial payment of $150 to secure an ATM card which could then be used to withdraw the money. As in classic cases of other prototypes of the advanced fee scam, this too asks the beneficiary to make the initial payment through a wire transfer service, which can't be tracked, according to cyber crime experts.
A senior official of the cyber crime cell of Tamil Nadu police said FBI and Reserve Bank of India's names are used to gain credibility and tempt people. "People must remember that FBI would never contact anybody directly. Another giveaway is the domain name of the sender. FBI e-mail ids would never end in '.com'," he said.
The FBI e-mail which is being circulated incidentally asks the receiver to send personal details to an email address ending in '.com'.