419 scam?

I received this message recently, I believe that is is a scam but am not sure - 419scam.org only found one suspicious phrase.

SMTP headers :

IP:209.85.220.68
EHLO mail-pa0-f68.google.com
MAIL FROM:<[email protected]> SIZE=2251
RCPT TO:<*************>

MIME headers :

Received: by mail-pa0-f68.google.com with SMTP id eu11so5578307pac.11
for <**************>; Mon, 04 Aug 2014 02:14:34 -0700 (PDT)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
d=gmail.com; s=20120113;
h=mime-version:reply-to:date:message-id:subject:from:to:content-type;
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05SA==
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X-Received: by 10.70.118.9 with SMTP id ki9mr2752570pdb.104.1407143674295;
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 02:14:34 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.70.4.165 with HTTP; Mon, 4 Aug 2014 02:14:34 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2014 10:14:34 +0100
Message-ID: <CAHt0JZqjnkZyMW78MhSgRyn21Cvcz6p9F-eEA4LwuQr5K8_mYQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Dear *****hiddenname****
From: Joseph Diara <[email protected]>
To: *************
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Message:

Dear Sir,

I am Mr.Joseph Diara currently working as an assistant
director(Contract Payment claim investigation panel) in the Nigerian
Federal Ministry Of WORKS Where Government contracts are awarded.

There is a Fund which has remained unclaimed for years and after
series of investigations we found out that the fund claim was an
inflated contract payment and the relevant documents to claim it
legally was missing hence the transfer of the fund was stopped by the
federal government.

Therefore,If you are interested i want you to come forward and claim
this fund as as the true beneficiary and we shall share the fund
60-40%. With my position and your cooperation all the legal documents
backing the fund in your name as the true beneficiary will be legally
obtained and documented for transfer and the transfer of the fund will
take place immediately.Please,note that there is no risk involved.

Yours Sincerely,

Mr.Joseph Diara


And how did he know my name?

It is a classic Advance Fee Fraud scam.

The scammer will have you pay all kinds of fee's for the pretend money. You will never receive any money. He will play all parts in this scam. Such as bankers, lawyers and court official.

And how did he know my name?

as BW says, it is a classic 419 scam format. For more help identifying these fake emails look at this article :
http://419advancefeefraud.blogspot.com/ ... -fake.html and this one too :
http://antifraudintl.org/showthread.php ... scam-email
Here is also an automated script for id'ing 419 AFF emails : http://www.scamomatic.com/

Now, as far as how he got your name, there are a # of different ways. First check search engines to see if your name shows up with your email address anywhere http://google.com can do that. Likely you have a resume or something online you forgot about, or possibly other publicly available information.

If that shows nothing, do an alert set up. https://www.google.com/alerts . Set your alerts with quotes, ergo "john smith" , not john smith. Set up 3 different alerts ( at least). 1 for your email address, 1 for your name, and 1 for your name and email address together.

No real person who finds an unclaimed fund would reach out to random strangers on the Internet to help him move it. It is a typical scam script.

I have found 1 location where my email and name are located together. However, I found that I had used a redirect to my email on that site. The redirect to the email was in the header. I would suspect that the scammer created a Launchpad account to find the information. I am in the process of removing it.

Other than that, thank you for identifying the scam.

It's possible the scammer got your info that way.

But just to point out for general awareness, there are several ways scammers can get that information. Some of the more common:
-unscrupulous companies sell their internet mailing lists to advertisers, who in turn sell them on the open market to any criminal that wants them
-hackers steal and sell address lists
-a friend or acquaintance was infected, hacked, or phished, and the criminals pulled and distributed the contents of their address book.

In my case that does not seem realistic, I don't think this information is stored any of those places. Also the only place I used the redirect to my email was on that site, and my name is only accessible on about 3 or 4 places on the Internet. I do not know of any people or companies who have the information, and that redirect to my email with my name is only in one place.