namelesstavern.net

Dearest One,

Good day to you and your family,
Please permit me to inform you of my desire of going into a guardianship relationship with you. I know this mail may come to you as a surprise, since we have not known or have met with each other before.

Introducing myself , I am Master Kone Bamba 20 years of age the only son of late Mr. Mohammed Babu Bamba, My father was a gold and cocoa merchant based in Accra, Ghana and Abidjan (Ivory Coast) He was poisoned to death by his business associates on one of their business meetings. Before the death of my father on 22th February 2004 in a private hospital here in Abidjan. He secretly told me on his bedside that he has a sum of USD$9.5Million deposited in Bank in
Abidjan Cote D' Voire,that he used my name as his only son for the next of kin in depositing the money.

He also told that he suspected that it was because of this wealth that he was poisoned by his business associates, that I should seek for a trustworthy foreigner in a country of my choice where I will transfer this money and use it for investment purpose such as expansion of his existing cocoa business and real estate management overseas. Now i have discussed with the bank here on how to transfer this money to your overseas account and they instructed that i must present to them my legal guardian before they could release the money because of my late father's deposit agreement with them. Please i am humbly seeeking your sincere assistance in the following ways.

1. To assist me in providing an account of yours where this money can be transferred into.

2.To serve as my guardian and that of this money since i am still yet to finish my education.

3.To make arrangement for me to come over to your country to further my education and to help me secure a residential permit in your country once this money gets to your account in your country. I am willing to offer you 20% of the total sum as compensation for your efforts and input after the successful transfer of this fund into your account overseas.

Please you can indicate your option towards assisting me as I believe that this transfer will be done within a short period of time. May Almighty God bless you as i wait your good response.
Master Kone Bamba.

Nigerian e-mail scammers are successfully targeting American churches and ministers, cheating them out of millions of dollars under the guise of spreading the word of Jesus.

"They are going after small churches, claiming someone has left them a lot of money to improve their church or help others," U.S. postal inspector Steve Korinko told ABC News for an investigative report on the Nigerian scams to be aired Friday on 20/20 and World News with Charles Gibson.

The catch, says Korinko, is that the church has to pay a legal fee or a Nigerian tax to collect the money.

An offer of $41,000,000 to the Hickory Ridge Community Church in Sussex County, Del., allowed scammers to cheat a group of prominent Christians out of $350,000.

"It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant," said Jeff Premo, an accountant hired by the church whose early skepticism about the offer ultimately dissolved after the Nigerians professed their faith.

"I thought I could ask them about, you know, 'Can you confess Jesus as Lord?' And they could answer all that," Premo told ABC News.

Premo traveled to Africa three times where he says the scammers posed as Nigerian diplomats. After he and the other community leaders ran out of money, Premo contacted the FBI and participated in an undercover sting that led to the arrest and conviction of the scammers in this country.

"They touched me on my hot button," Premo told ABC News about his faith. "Everybody had a hot button," he said.

U.S. postal inspectors say there are similar cases involving Christian churches being targeted across the country.

In Massachusetts, prosecutors say John Worley, an ordained minister and Christian psychotherapist, got so caught up in a Nigerian scam he went from being a victim to becoming an accomplice.

Convicted of fraud, Worley is currently serving a two-year prison sentence.

The widely-reported case of Mary Winkler, the Tennessee woman accused of murdering her minister husband, also grew out of a Nigerian scam, according to prosecutors.

Federal investigators say she had been cashing a series of counterfeit checks from Nigeria at a Tennessee bank.

Her family says she shot her husband after years of abuse.

In court, prosecutors have alleged she decided to shoot her husband after he confronted her about the scam.

Nigeria, Africa - On November 2, 2002, Pastor Deacon Fred, along with several other Landover Baptist staff members, received an important e-mail message from Basher Mobutu, son of the late President of Nigeria, Mobutu Sese Seko. "I knew that the matter was urgent," recalled Pastor Deacon Fred, "because he had taken the time to send copies not only just to me, but also to everyone on our staff and their families." In the e-mail, Basher explained that he knew that Pastor and those who received the e-mail message would be surprised to hear from him, but assumed that the Landover Baptist Church was already aware of a financial dispute between his family and the present civilian government of Nigeria. Basher conveyed that due to circumstances beyond his control, his father's bank accounts in Switzerland and North America were frozen. He went on to solicit the Church's confidential assistance in taking custody of thirty million United States dollars (US$30,000,000.00). "Naturally, that bountiful sum caught my well trained eye," said Pastor. "And we didn't get to be the richest church in America by asking a lot of questions when folks wave a fistful of cash in our faces."

Without a second thought, Pastor Deacon Fred phoned Mrs. Betty Bowers regarding the situation. They decided not to ask actor Don Johnson to fetch the cash for his usual fee after some scathing comments from a previous, dissatisfied customer in Germany. Instead, on the following day, Pastor and Betty, along with a team of Landover Baptist unsaved Jewish lawyers and accountants, several personal body guards and coolers filled with food that doesn't give you dysentery or indigestion, were aboard Mrs. Bowers' Christian Ministries' private Gulfstream V jet, on their way to a savage land no one had even heard before the e-mail called "Nigeria." They made one stop in Switzerland, to refuel and authorize UBS bank to do whatever was necessary to assist Mr. Mobutu. Immediately afterward, they received their shots, and were off to the godless country of Nigeria to meet with Mr. Mobutu.

"Frankly, I harbor great trepidation at the prospect of being in a country where the minority is, perversely, the majority," Mrs. Betty Bowers told the president of UBS Financial Services when he drove the Landover Baptist dignitaries to the Geneva airport. "Granted, I've been exposed to colored people in the United States through my Christian Crack Whore Ministry, but these are genuine Negroes we were about to face. The type without cell phones and Louis Vuitton knockoff visors."

"As a real American," Pastor would latter recall, "I would have no reason to ever go to an uncivilized country like Africa. But as a Christian, I was curious to return to the Garden of Eden where the Lord had first given man a paradise – only to snatch it back from them in an angry rage. Once I got there, I realized that the deck was stacked against Adam and Eve from the get go. As Mrs. Bowers and I well knew, to be the only two white people in Africa is a daunting ordeal."

Pastor's and Mrs. Bowers' worst fears did not prepare them for what awaited in the aptly named Dark Continent. It was only after the eager Landover delegation went through the unsettling ordeal of landing a 72,000 pound private jet in the middle of a herd of impalas and a wildly scrambling tribal wedding that they discovered the e-mail was some type of sick hoax. "Honestly, you think American Negroes are sneaky," remarked Pastor Deacon Fred, "but they have nothing on their sub-Saharan cousins."

When the phone number that Mr. Mobutu had given them proved not only not to work, but also be eight digits in excess of all local numbers, Pastor and Mrs. Bowers, loving Christians armed only with bibles, began banging on doors throughout Abuja, accompanied only by their automatic weapon wielding security detail. When this three-day effort failed to find the writer of the e-mail, much less $30,000,000, they resorted to stopping natives on the street, waving Mr. Mobutu's e-mail in their faces and demanding: "Where is this person?"

"It was only when we were on the plane back to civilization that it occurred to me that none of them African Americans in Nigeria can probably read a stop sign, much less a sophisticated e-mail about high finance," said Pastor with a laugh.

After almost a week, not only did they fail to locate the promised money, but they received a call from Geneva to say that, pursuant to a wire transfer request on the previous day, UBS had moved $7,000,000 from one of Landover Baptist's accounts to a small bank in Nigeria. Upon realizing that they had been swindled, the Lord filled the Landover delegation with a righteous rage.

"As an devoted admirer of President Bush, I knew exactly what to do when a foreigner does something that gets under your skin," recalled Pastor Deacon Fred. "You take over their country. So, I had one of the unsaved lawyers go back to Betty's jet and fetch me Old Glory." With the American flag in hand, the Landover pioneers went to the center of Abuja, planted the banner in the ground and sang a hymn. "We then claimed everything – out to the city limits if they had any – in the name of the Lord Jesus, America and Landover Baptist Offshore Holdings, LLC"

After an afternoon of intense fighting, Landover had only been able secure a gas station, a brothel and rusty pen that had held a seemingly bulimic goat that eventually got away. Undaunted, the prayer warriors had UBS wire additional money to a different bank to pay for local armed mercenaries to be hired to kill for Christ.

"Once we had hired about 300 natives and bought weapons for all of them, we bid a gracious goodbye to our subjects in our new kingdom," said Pastor Deacon Fred. "Betty can only go so long without shopping and once we had hired those thugs to do the Lord's work, things got very bloody and dangerous overnight. When you are in the thick of claiming souls and acreage for the Lord, you can't always assess the power of righteousness, but according to Fox News 180 folks died in street warfare while we were checking out of our hotel. And that is nothing compared to the number of willful souls who had to be put down for the Glory of Christ after we left. Yes, it is unfortunate, but like my golfing buddy [Secretary of Defense] Old Rummy says, 'democracy is untidy.' And so, apparently, is starting up a Christian kingdom in Africa."

Upon returning to drinking water, Pastor held a press conference to warn Americans that even though New Eden (formerly Nigeria) was under increasingly Christian control, dangerous SPAM mails were still being sent. "These e-mails are very sophisticated. You almost have to be a genius to guess that they aren't for real. Which is why I've been working very closely with the FBI on this so another American doesn't get duped, wind up losing a lot of money and end up with the constant headache of being the potentate of a lawless country in Africa."

Explaining his embarrassment over realizing he had been the victim of a clever e-mail con game, Pastor Deacon Fred told the 700 Club: "Being Baptist, growing up reading only the Bible, we are taught never to question the truth of anything someone has taken the time to type. So, naturally, I took it on face value that this little African fellow had millions of dollars he was willing to give us – and millions more we could call upon the power of the Lord to coax him out of. I now realize that he was like the devil -- cagily tailoring temptation to play into the biggest weakness of the tempted. I'm sure if I had been Whitney Houston, the e-mail would have promised a pile of prime Columbian cocaine the size of Kilimanjaro. But since it was me, a Pastor at an American Christian church, of course, I was offered cash."

"If you receive any e-mails from any of my New Edenites, either offering money or telling you they are being tortured if they don't accept Jesus as their Personal Savior, just do yourself a favor and please delete them."

In an effort to alert public readers of the Landover Baptist Church web site to recent e-mail attacks coming from the former Nigeria, a typical letter has been placed below. Please note, Pastor Deacon Fred assures everyone that he has gone to great lengths in order to find out who the author of this e-mail is. We can happily say that we've received word from New Eden that if there ever was such a person named Mrs. Mariam Mobutu, she no longer exists.

Dylan wrote:I didn't know Mindia has been to Africa.