What Are Government Related Scams?

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Government related scams are a far and wide reaching range of scams with many different types and are one of the most common form of scam emails.

They involve falsely representing government offices, governmental departments, NGOs, and included in the scam mails there will be names of bureaucrats, government officers or government officials, either past or present, some real, some fictional.

The scams often claim to represent entities that are things like central banks of African governments, The International Monetary Fund (IMF), The United Nations, The World Bank, US Customs, The FBI, The CIA, The US Federal Reserve Bank, etc.

Some of the scammers will also claim to be diplomats, politicians working in government, embassy employees, foreign dignitaries, ambassadors, and even leaders of countries.

Many government scams also claim the money is due as a result of compensation for being a scam victim. Click here to read more about Scam Victim Compensation scams.

In most cases the scams will involve a large payment that the scammer would like to transfer to your account as a payment to you for something or from a debt reconciliation or some overdue funds. Others will say you are owed money from a payment oversight or from various other governmental sources of money that was mistakenly forgotten about.

During the course of the scam the scammer may provide a so-called online banking website (with login details) in an attempt to prove that the funds truly exist and are safely sitting in a bank account awaiting payout. In all cases these bank websites are always fraudulent/fake websites owned and controlled by the scammer and the money that they are showing within the bank account are fictitious funds in a non-existent bank account. The scammer may also ask you to contact 2-3 different people that the scammer claims are also involved with the transaction as a psychological technique designed to make the transaction seem more legitimate. In most cases though you are dealing with only one scammer who is acting behind all of the various different personas being presented.

The scammer will eventually ask you to send some money before any of the money being promised can be sent out to you. This is a type of scam known as Advance-Fee Fraud. Advance-Fee Fraud is best described as an offer of money, merchandise, services, employment, or even romance, but where the victim is asked to pay a fee in advance to obtain whatever is being promised to them by the scammer. The main scam strategy of all advance-fee fraud scams is to try to persuade the victim to send money, and then continue to send more money to the scammer, as many times as possible, until the victim eventually runs out of money and/or goes into debt as a result of losses from the scam. And in the end, the victim never receives any of the money at all being promised by the scammer.

Please click here to read more about the psychological techniques used to deceive people with Advance-Fee Fraud scams. The following article on Wikipedia also explains more about Advance-Fee Scams in general: Wikipedia Link