Monthly Archives: March 2022

So many scammers

Posted on by The Old Wolf

These ignorant jimakplons¹ pass their scam techniques from one to another, and each new scumbag tries it again. Please be aware of this kind of thing.

I got a Facebook message from a supposed friend that started out like this:

I have blurred relevant information because this is a clone of a real friend on Facebook who has nothing to do with this scam.

And I will usually respond, just to lead these jackasses down the garden path, and because I’m retired, and have the time to make their lives miserable.

I ask for more information, and I am directed to a facebook page where I can supposedly apply for this phony “grant.”

The page looks like this:

It looks respectable enough, but the photo was scraped from the Internet and is the picture of Bryan County, Oklahoma Sheriff Johnny Christian, who also has nothing to do with this scam. These criminals are so stupid it makes me want to rake my eyes out with a fork.

[Note: after I have done messing with these people, I always report the false profiles and pages to Facebook and have them taken down.]

So they ask me for a lot of personal information:

You are required to fill out the info one after the mother as normal messages on here, accurate information is needed for evaluation. 100% FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GUARANTEE 🇱🇷🇱🇷.
Full name:
Adress:
Full date of Your birth:
Male/female:
Contact information: Phone #, Pager #, Vp # etc:
Employment status (or Unemployed):
Phone Carrier:
Email:
Hearing or deaf:
Monthly income:
Single or Married:
Picture of a valid ID card:
Do you want cash or check:
100% FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GUARANTEE 🇱🇷🇱🇷.

… and I return to them with a lot of bogus garbage.

Yay! I’m qualified!

Congratulations Mr. wolfington Analemma. This is to let you know you are eligible for the United Nation and Government grant offer. Congratulation on your winnings as our verification team alerts that your data verification process was successful approved. 100% FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GUARANTEE 🇱🇷🇱🇷

But wait, we’re not done. Here comes the important part… I have to pay a “clearance and delivery fee” to get my “grant.”

You pay $1,000 and get $50,000,00 You pay $1,500 and get $60,000,00 You pay $2,500 and get $100,000,00 You pay $3,000 and get $150,000.00 You pay $3,500 and get $200,000.00 You pay $4,000 and get $250,000.00 You pay $4,500 and get $300,000.00 You pay $5,000 and get $350,000.00 You pay $5,500 and get $400,000.00 You Pay $6,000 and get $450,000.00 You pay $7,000 and get $500,000.00 You pay $8,500 and get $600,000.00 You pay $9,000 and get $750,000.00 You pay $10,500 and get $800,000.00 You pay $12,000 and get $900,000.00 You pay $14,500 and get $1000,000.00….. 100% FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GUARANTEE 🇺🇸🇺🇸

As I have said in my many other posts regarding scams and scammers:

NEVER EVER EVER PAY MONEY TO COLLECT A PRIZE OR A GRANT. EVER. JUST DON’T. IT’S A SCAM, AND YOU WON’T GET ANYTHING.

Based on the poor formatting and lousy English, it should be obvious to anyone that this is not a legitimate operation. But sadly, a lot of people are not highly educated or computer savvy, which is why I keep posting things like this. The scammers will never stop as long as they think there are people who will send them money, and sadly there are enough to make it worth their time.

The clearance and delivery fee is meant for the delivery department to start preparing your grant delivery information, and it has to be paid upfront. You are required to choose from the above listed offers available for you to claim from the grant office. 100% FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GUARANTEE 🇱🇷🇱🇷.

This is exactly why this kind of scam is called “Advance Fee Fraud.” Whether it’s a grant, or a prize, or a sweepstakes, or a tempting job offer… you always are required to pay money up front. And when the scammers get your money, either they will vanish into the gloom, or – if they think they can – they will put the touch on you for more, and more, and more. Fees, bribes, delivery charges, attorney retainers, anything they think you’ll pay for in the hopes of getting money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, if they think you’ll send it. I’ve watched it happen to loved ones of mine, which started me out on this little crusade.

kindly Confirm YES if you’re ready to make your payment right now so we can proceed on your delivery information and once your payment has been confirmed by the delivery department will provide you necessary information our fedEx delivery men will need at your doorstep… Note all payment will be paid in US dollars 100%FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GRANT 🇱🇷🇱🇷

They don’t waste any time getting you to loosen your purse strings.
Send No Money, EVER. By any means.

Do you have cash app or Zelle PayPal to make your payment easier for you now? 100%FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GRANT 🇱🇷🇱🇷

Kindly purchase an AMERICAN EXPRESS activation card of $14,500 (14*1000) and make sure you get the receipt of each card so I can activate your grant necessary documents for delivery sir.Understood? 100% FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GUARANTEE 🇱🇷🇱🇷

So now the game draws to a close. Of course I have no intention of sending these onioburus² a red cent, and I tell them so in no uncertain terms, with a variety of vulgar insults in English, Nigerian pidgin, and a couple of other tongues.

Be careful out there, and educate your vulnerable loved ones.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹ To call someone a “jimakplon” in Benin is a terrible insult to one’s parents. It was defined thusly over at “Friends of Bonou”:

Question: Actually this reminds me: it is also true about an insult that Europeans would find laughably mild and that is really serious in Benin: it is when you are accused of being impolite: You loose face totally if you are insulted like that, apparently: Why?
Answer: Ah. It is because “Impolite” is a translation of a Fon word, “jimakplon.” = “Ji” means “born,” “ma” means “not,” and “kplon” means “teach.” So what “jimakplon” really means is “born but not taught.” You were born into this world but didn’t receive any social education. So this is serious because it is an insult against the parents of the person you’re talking to: “Impolite” is a slur on the parents of the person you’re insulting, who didn’t give them a social education, and this is a BIG face loss!

It’s a term I find entirely appropriate to describe these ignorant scammers.

² An Onioburu is the Nigerian term for a “gong farmer,” someone who empties latrines. Probably not a nice thing to say to anyone, but these scammers are scum.

Happy International Women’s Day

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Today Google honors International Women’s Day with one of their doodles.

I am 100% in favor of honoring the women of the world. And, I have some thoughts. Consider these remarks by Morgan Freeman on the occasion of Black History Month:

MIKE WALLACE: Black History Month, you find …
MORGAN FREEMAN: Ridiculous.
WALLACE: Why?
FREEMAN: You’re going to relegate my history to a month?
WALLACE: Come on.
FREEMAN: What do you do with yours? Which month is White History Month? Come on, tell me.
WALLACE: I’m Jewish.
FREEMAN: OK. Which month is Jewish History Month?
WALLACE: There isn’t one.
FREEMAN: Why not? Do you want one?
WALLACE: No, no.
FREEMAN: I don’t either. I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.
WALLACE: How are we going to get rid of racism until …?
FREEMAN: Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You’re not going to say, “I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.” Hear what I’m saying?

2005 interview with Mike Wallace for television’s “60 Minutes” news magazine program

There has recently been an immensely favorable response to the Neflix series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” ¹ as well as rising awareness of the challenges still faced by women around the globe (astonishingly, in the 21st Century. Sadly, there are bastions of troglodicity (my own word) in my own country where people in power are bound and determined to keep women in a state of perpetual subjection and inferiority – notably the US Congress, SCOTUS, and legislatures in various “red” states around the nation, such as Texas, Alabama, Utah, and many others.

The Christian faith has a lot to do with it, especially religion of the evangelical sort:

“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour.”

Ephesians 5: 22-23

“Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man; rather, she is to remain silent.”

1 Timothy 2: 11-12

But even in non-Christian societies, the pervasive attitude that women are inferior beings has been present for millennia – the following passage from one of my favorite short stories, set in Brazil, lays it out pretty clearly.

Then [the tribal chief] went on to explain—it took all night—that the tictoc nut was not like other nuts. Everything, said the chief, everything could think a little. Even a leaf had sense enough to turn itself to the light. Even a rat. Even a woman. Sometimes, even a hard-shelled nut. Now when the world was made, the deuce of a long time ago, man having been created, there was a little intelligence left over for distribution. Woman got some. Rats got some. Leaves got some. Insects got some. In short, at last there was very little left. Then the tictoc bush spoke up and begged, “A little for us?”

“River of Riches” by Gerald Kersh, 1958

Fast forward to our day and age and country, and these attitudes have some direct consequences within individual families, and not just in the less-tangible global sense of economic and social inequality. In other countries it’s worse still; female children in Afghanistan and India, for example, are more likely to be abandoned, sex-selectively aborted or killed in instances of infanticide than are boys. Human trafficking, largely perpetrated upon women and female children, continues to be rampant. The evil is mind-clenching.

If we’re going to be fair about it, every other day should be International Women’s Day… plus February 29th when it rolls around because women slightly outnumber men on a global basis. But until the recognition which they deserve is granted them in the same sense that Morgan Freeman expressed, I give honor – every day – to all the women of the world², who not only bear and raise the next generation but who have made incalculable contributions to humanity since the dawn of time.

This little essay may do absolutely nothing to improve the situation, but I felt that for myself, it was important to mark the day with more than just a congratulatory message.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹ If you liked the series, read the books by Margaret Atwood, including The Testaments. They add a lot of things you’ll never see in the series and leave you with some reasons for optimism instead of bleak hopelessness.

² Cis-, trans-, or otherwise, in case you were wondering.

The Heat Death of the Universe

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This lovely video, intimately crafted, was a delightful and wistful view into a time so far removed from us that it’s difficult to even get one’s head around. More years in the future than there are atoms in the observable universe, 8 * 10¹²⁰ years according to this imagining… but still fascinating.

Most of it is pure speculation, but it’s speculation based on mathematics that have been developed at this point in time, and real observations of the universe and what happens inside places like the Large Hadron Collider and other particle-generating devices.

Hasn’t happened yet.

If you’re not sure, the joke here is that some fear the energies generated within the Large Hadron Collider will be great enough to rip a hole in the fabric of space time, or to create a local black hole that will consume the earth. But thus far, this has shown no signs of happening.

The Large Hadron Collider

I’ve seen other such productions, equally thought-provoking, and all of them put me in mind of Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question.” It’s a similar imagination, although somewhat simplified because the concept of black holes would only be posited two years after the story was written, of what happens when entropy reaches its ultimate terminal state, and there is no energy left anywhere in the universe at all. It revolves around humanity’s quest to stop the heat death of the universe, by asking ever-more powerful computers, “How can entropy be reversed?”

The eternal response

It’s a beautiful story, and I won’t spoil it, because it has an unexpected ending – one that always brings a few tears to my eyes – and it gives me hope for the continuation of life; I just love Asimov’s writings. I recall with fondness a dramatization of this story that I saw long ago at the Hansen Planetarium, when it was still at its original home in the renovated Salt Lake Public Library at 15 South State Street in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The old Hansen Planetarium

Fortunately or unfortunately, right now all we have to worry about is destroying our world by allowing climate change to proceed unchecked, and insane despots like Vladimir Putain knocking on the door of World War III with his rapacious attacks on innocent neighbors.¹ But from a scientific standpoint, it is captivating to imagine what will happen to our universe when all of these concerns have become moot.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹

I stand with Ukraine.