Month: September 2013

A new one in the inbox, and I want to draw your attention to the craftsmanship.

It opens “ATTN: President/Ceo”, which suggests Engr. John Lambo has done his research and concluded that this blog is a multinational. He found me, he says, “from the Export Promotion Council Foreign Exhibition”, an event I have somehow attended without noticing.

Then, three paragraphs in, comes my favourite confession in the history of unsolicited email. He explains that his ministry awarded a contract to a foreign firm, and that this contract was, and I quote, one “which we the officials over-invoiced and deliberately increased”. The original contractor has been paid. There is 27,350,000 dollars left over. He is telling me this not as a warning but as a CV.

Consider the moral architecture here. Engr. Lambo and his colleagues have embezzled twenty seven million dollars and are entirely relaxed about it. The thing standing between them and the money is not the police, or an auditor, or their conscience. It is that “the Civil Service Code of Conduct does not allow public servants like us to operate offshore account”. Fraud, fine. Improper account paperwork, absolutely not. There are standards.

He would like me to be his “Partner/Trustee”. He will require my “oath of trust”. He assures me the transaction is “100% risk-free and highly classified”, which are two things that are rarely both true, and he needs my telephone and fax numbers for effective communications. Fax. In case the twenty seven million needs faxing.

Best of all, for security reasons, because they are such highly placed government officials, I am to reply only to his confidential email address. Which is at libero.it. Free Italian webmail. Nothing says Executive Director of Finance and Accounts at a national petroleum subsidiary quite like a webmail account you could sign up for during an advert break.

My cut would be 20 percent, so five million four hundred and seventy thousand dollars, for the work of owning a bank account. I have not replied, which on reflection makes me the only person in this correspondence behaving unreasonably.

I should also note, purely for the record, that my husband’s internet handle has been Lambo for as long as I have known him. If twenty seven million dollars does turn up, I know exactly who is going to claim it was addressed to him.

The full thing, in all its glory, is here: John Lambo (PDF).