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Last week I saw on Dateline with Chris Hansen - "To Catch An ID Thief" where they took it one step further. It revolved around credit card fraud. The goods were shipped to people in the US. These people had fallen in love with people they met online (the nigerian scammers). From there, the US people would ship it to South Africa I believe, where someone else would receive the packages. From there they were shipped to Bellini, the country right next to Nigeria (its a better disguise as more people realize how much scam originates out of Nigeria). They tracked a few packages, each package had a special tracking device for them. At one point, the package was picked up right from a shipping dock where all packages go thru when it enters the country. They went and spoke to the postal inspector - and mysteriously, the package re-emerged there all beat up and repackaged.
They then took over the emails of one of the US guys who was doing the shipping from the US. In the love letters, he said he was interested in helping her with her new business so they arranged a place to meet up. (Btw, the pictures of the girls were generic porn pictures). Chris Hansen poses as the guy, its all recorded, their in Bellini. A "barrister" comes in with a girl who doesn't look like her. They go through the whole process, its very entertaining. It goes from one business proposition to another, to another. He catches the guy in all the lies, brings out the camera crews, etc. He couldn't have him arrested, but it was quite entertaining. I highly recommend searching for it on YouTube.
On a side note, a few years ago, i believe Russian scammers were using Melissa's photos saying they needed money to move over to the US. We were contacted, quite a few people were scammed, in some cases, up to a few thousand dollars. These scams are quite widespread.
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