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Exiled Nigerian Prince® Contact PageI sincerely hope you didn't get here because you thought you were going to get a big direct deposit into your bank account.The "Exiled Nigerian Prince" is a notorious Internet hoax, based on a centuries-old "con" called "The Spanish Prisoner." In the original sixteenth-century hoax, some wealthy person has been unjustly thrown into prison. He has promised great financial rewards for anyone who will send the money to bribe the guards into releasing him or some such. There are probably hundreds of variations. But they all involve:
Sadly, the Internet has given such hoaxters a far easier way to con millions out of unspecting, but greedy people. In the Internet version:
Depending on your bank account's overdraft protection policy, they may take out more money than you even have in the bank. And guess who's responsible for any extra they withdraw? You. In other words, the Exiled Nigerian Prince does not exist. And no stranger, period, is really going to send you money, no matter sincere they sound. Why is There an Exiled Nigerian Prince Thread on the CreekDontRise.com Discussion Forums?It's just my attempt at humor in turning the con back on its head. And I get hit up by a lot of cons.Because I operate a number of web pages, I get emails from spammers, scammers, and phishers every day. According to these "concerned people," their only purpose in life is to make my bank accounts fuller, my web pages more popular, and my life better in every way. All they need is for me to click on a link to a web page in a third-world country or to send them personal information like my social security number, date-of-birth, bank account number, and routing code, FTP access to my web pages, or some subset of that data. After a peculiarly heavy stream of these one week, I decided to use the question-and-answer format of the CreekDontRise.com discussion forum (humor page) to post appropriate replies back to the original spammers, scammers, and phishers. Sadly, I don't have the courage to reply to the original hoaxters this way. For one thing, replying tells them that my e-mail addresses reach a real person and that just encourages them to spam me even more. Worse yet, some of these folks have connections with international criminals who can easily shut my web pages down through denial of service or worse. So, while the e-mails asking for money, offering to make me rich, or offering to "fix" my web sites (below) are all VERY real, my responses only go onto this page, for your enjoyment. Nothing is ever actually forwarded to the Exiled Nigerian Prince (or as we affectionately call him, the ENP), because he does not exist. If you want to see our version of the fictitious Exiled Nigerian Prince's fictitious adventures click here. The ENP and the "SEO Boosters"If you don't run a web page, you may never have been contacted by a fake SEO (Search Engine Optimization) booster. That is a hoaxter who swears he's done a detailed analysis of your web site and would be glad to help you get onto the first page of Google for all related search terms. He'll even promise to "fix" a single page for free, just to show how effective his techniques can be.The first time you get one of these, you might actually imagine that he really has taken a look at your page. But by the time you've gotten ten of these, ostensibly from ten different people, and the list of things "wrong" with your site after their "careful analysis" is word-for-word the same in every e-mail, you begin to get the drift. If you don't mind your website being hacked to dump viruses on all your readers or to replace every link with porn sites, go ahead and give them access to your web page. And the keys to your house and car, and the password to your laptop, while you're at it. You haven't lived until Google has kicked a large, ten-year-old, family-friendly site out of their system for linking to viruses and and porn, and you've had to take down your site and completely reload it from your archives so that you could prove your site is clean, and then earn your way back to where you were before. No, I didn't fall for this scam; I was hacked by a real hacker, and it wasn't any fun, but the results were the same. One irony is that the "SEO booster" scammers never contact me about sites that are truly languishing out there in the "Google Page 50" limbo - they only contact me about pages that are already popping on the first or second Google page for most related search terms. Why so "picky"? Because the underworld creeps who are paying them to sabotage my pages are only interested in sabotaging pages that people are already going to in droves. In our ostensible replies to these folks, we often claim that our fictitious ENP "needs" a web site presense to refute all the negative publicity he's gotten elsewhere on the web. So I always offer to have him send an obscene fortune to anyone who will set up and maintain such a site. In the meantime, if you're a website owner who has gotten the same sort of e-mails from strangers with no web site, company name, or even domain URL, you may find it instructive to compare the scams you've received to the scams we've received. The crowning irony of this entire enterprise is that after about four weeks of making fake promises to send fake SEOs obscene amounts of money to move the Exiled Nigerian Prince's web page to the first page of Google searches, OUR humor pages (and this page) found their way to the first page of Google searches for "Exiled Nigerian Prince" all on their own. That's called "organic growth," folks, and is the only kind we've ever invested in. In fact, response has been so surprising that we registered the domain name "ExiledNigerianPrince.com" to keep someone else from "cashing in on" our work (believe it or not, that has happened with other web pages.) And then REAL WEB DEVELOPERS started contacting us asking for the job of creating a web page for ExiledNigerianPrince.com. So far I haven't been able to stop laughing long enough to tell any of them that offering to build a web site based around the Internet's most notorious hoax probably isn't a good idea. The ENP and Christmas ScammersAs we approach the Christmas season, I start getting requests for people who want me to "save Christmas" for their family. Do I look like Ernest Apparently someone has put my sites on a list of sites people can e-mail for free money in the name of Christmas. I do support worthy causes I trust, but I am not the (fictitious) Exiled Nigerian Prince, sitting around on untold millions of dollars, hoping to find strangers who are willing to reduce the burden of having that much cash on-hand. Thanks to the illicit links to our contact information from scam charity sites, we have received quite a number of requests for financial Christmas help. These include requests for money from career criminals with multiple e-mail addresses and sob stories. And every time we change our contact page to explain why we now must delete every request for money, the scammers tweak their requests to say why they should be the exception, and they send their scams anyway. In "his" response to these scammers, the Exiled Nigerian Prince has never used the actual content or contact information of the request (it would be a shame if we accidentally singled out the one-out-of-a-thousand request from a real needy family to skewer). But "he" knows who you are. :-) I also wrote an article for one of my Christmas sites about avoiding charity scams. Click on the graphic to the right to read it. About the Beautiful Painting at the Top of the Page
Artist Aaron Miller was once approached by a scammer with the "will you take a check?" verion of the scam. When he researched it on the internet, he was so impressed by what he found that he painted the "Save the Prince" poster as a joke and posted it on his own web page.
Aaron has very kindly agreed to let us use his "ENP" imagery on these pages, and in return I am VERY glad to tell you that he has done many stunning fantasy paintings, including one of my favorites, the "Beauty and the Beast" painting to the right. And, yes, he has merchandise.
If you Really Want to Contact Somebody?To contact me through the CreekDontRise.com site, please use this link. To sign up for the CreekDontRise.com discussion forums, please use this link. To contact me through my music, facebook, blog, or YouTube channel, use the little icons about an inch down the page. To return to the CreekDontRise.comTM Home Page, click here.
And please stay in touch! - Paul Race
All material, illustrations, and content of this web site is copyrighted © 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006,
For questions, comments, suggestions, trouble reports, etc. about this page or this site, please contact us.
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