Feng Shui Master
Tony Chan Chun-chuen ( pronounced: Tony Chan Chun-chuen ) is considered by some a Feng shui Master. As a Master, he understands relationships between physical objects, and the benefits of a perfectly arranged universe. Others consider him a charlatan, a fake fortune teller with a speckled past. Either way, I highly doubt that he is responsible for these fake scam emails.
As is my custom I’ve highlighted some Scam Flags in BOLD, and added comments where appropriate. Ready? Here we go….
Dear Friend,
My name is Tony Chan Chun-chuen, friend and close confidant to NinaWang (RUN-ON ) Kung, Who (CAPS) passed away on the 3rd of April 2007. I will save your time by not boring you with all the details at thistime (RUN-ON), Which (CAPS)has already been disseminated by the international media during the Controversial(CAPS) dispute that erupted between her and her late husband Relatives(possessive and CAPS) concerning the huge estate he left behind.
To save my time and yours I ask that you go to this link,
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/200704/04/xyzxyx.htm
If you want to know what’s behind that link, but are too smart to click it, here it is, from ChinaDaily.com. Remember, this isn’t part of the email. It’s a true story the scammer links to so as to create some credibility.
HONG KONG – Asia’s richest woman, Nina Wang, has died of an unspecified illness after reports she had been battling cancer, leaving unanswered questions over the estimated $4.2 billion fortune she left behind.
Known for her signature pigtails and nicknamed “little sweetie” by the local media, Wang, 69, won a court case in 2005 for her late husband’s business empire in a case filled with tales of adultery, kidnapping and murder.
The Hong Kong heiress, whose maiden name was Kung, was reported by local newspapers to be suffering from cancer, but that was never officially confirmed.
“Chinachem Group’s chairwoman Nina Wang Kung passed away on April 3 and the details of the funeral will be announced later,” her personal assistant, Ringo Wong, told Reuters by telephone.
Wang’s company, Hong Kong’s largest private property developer, Chinachem Group, confirmed in a statement that she died on Tuesday.
Wang was ranked by Forbes Magazine as Asia’s 35th richest person, having successfully battled her father-in-law for a multi-billion dollar estate left by her late husband Teddy Wang, a property tycoon who vanished more than a decade ago.
Central to the marathon probate case was a handwritten will which Wang said was penned and signed by Teddy in March 1990, a month before he was kidnapped and never seen again.
There’s a growing trend in these scamming emails to include a safe link, typically to a real news article about some disaster or, in this case, a dead rich person. In doing this, the scammer is trying to accomplish 3 things.
The first is to add some credibility to the email. If you click a link in an email and you don’t get infested with some bug, and instead, you are taken to a respected news site, there is a measure of trust that you assign to the email.
The second thing our scammer wants to do is create a bit of drama around the subject of the email. Drama is meant to involve us emotionally, make us want to take action. Humans are creatures of drama. Most of us can’t help it. That’s why most of us say we “hate drama”. But our scammer knows that if he can get us interested in the drama, there’s a good chance he can get us involved in the drama.
The final thing our scammer is hoping for is to break down barriers you might have about answering his email. Like any good salesman, he knows that every sale starts with a “No” and ends with a “Yes”. The more times he can get you to say “yes” before he tries to close the deal, the easier it will become for you to say “yes” when the money is on the line.
Our hopeful scammer knows that these 3 things will get him the response he needs: Trust, Involvement and a History of saying “yes”. It’s up to us to recognize the obvious salesmanship and respond in a way that defeats these tactics. Remember, the easiest way to sell a lie is to wrap it tightly in truth.
Meanwhile, back at the Scam Email ranch, the fake feng shui master can’t tell the wind from the water… (I’ll leave my remaining comments till the conclusion.)
As you will learn after going through the link above, all sorts of stories Have been assumed concerning the huge sum of money she left behind. Some Stories even say she left the bulk of her estate to me .But the truth is, Although I am the sole custodian of a huge sum of her estate, she left strict Instructions that I hand over the money to charity and also that under no Circumstance should I let any of her late husbands relatives and even her own Relatives lay their hands on the money. Contrary to media reports, she made Sure her immediate family is well catered for since she had no children of her Own,Before her death Nina Wang went ahead to dispatch the sum of Eight hundred and Twenty Million British Pounds (820,000,000.00 GBP) in cash with the assistance Of a foreign diplomat who now resides in Europe, but I will ensure to make her Wish comes through.
Now the reason why I have contacted you is that there is also some other ,strong>Funds in the tune of $12,000,000.00 with the Hang Seng Bank China,and I want Your assistance for me to transfer these funds in your name to your account for Both of us I will agree to share with you in a negotiable percentage as far as You agree to take part in this mutual benefiting opportunity.
Please I count on your absolute confidentiality, transparency and trust
while Looking forward to your prompt response towards a swift conclusion of this Business transaction through my email address as follows:
info_ninawangxyz@yahoo.com.hkThanks & May the Stars Guide us In the Right Path,
I remain yours sincerely,
Tony Chan Chun-chuen
.
That 1st paragraph since the last comments is full of the same mistakes we’ve seen above. Misuse of caps, punctuation… the usual suspects we’ve come to know, love and expect. And then, in the next paragraphs ( in italics) he loses any sense of grammar completely. That 1st paragraph in italics is only one really long sentence. Same with the next one. You’ll see this in many of the scam emails. It comes across like a child asking for something they want really badly. Just as they’re getting to the heart of it all, they seem to lose the ability to breathe and all the words come out at once.
In the final analysis, this scam was put together pretty well, almost (dare I say) professionally. It’s most glaring Scam Flag is something I haven’t mentioned yet, but here it is: The point to the email is to ask you to do something illegal. That right there is enough to make me flag it as junk and hit the delete key.
I am Jon and I quote the Zhangshu:
Qi rides the wind and scatters, but is retained when encountering water.