Naturally I thought that I was rich at last. But something gave me pause for thought.
It was the fifth time, at least, that I had been told through an anonymous email message that I had earned £1 000 000 (yes, one million pounds sterling, cash) in the space of two years. That amounts to £5-million: not a bad sum, given the precarious state of my own official bank balance.
The impulse to leap at the quick and easy road to fortune was almost too tempting to ignore. But something held me back.
Why me? I asked myself. I ignored the first few offers of this supposed success in the email lottery, and waited to see what would happen next.
Sure enough, a month of sensitive waiting for my response produced further wonderful surprises. This time, I was told that I had won â,¬1 000 000 — a million euros, which, if not quite the same as a million sterling, was still something to reckon with.
Like I say, it seemed that I was rich. There wasn’t even any small print. I just had to fill in my personal details on the kindly enclosed form, including my street and postal addresses, ID number, banking details and so on, and the cash would be flying in my direction, no questions asked, within a matter of days.
My email address, I was told, had been plucked out of a carefully planned lottery that I knew nothing about, and among no less than 29 031 of such addresses randomly picked out of a virtual hat, I had hit the big time. ”Hullo, stranger, and congratulations.” Such was the tone.
An involuntarily puritanical streak made me ignore the first offers, with suitable gratitude for this unexpected accolade. After a month or two, I was being bombarded with promises of more prize money. No comment was made about the fact that I had not met the deadline for accepting the prize in the first place. I was offered a million quid from another source, carefully detailed with new addresses, and new, impeccable credentials, to which I was respectfully invited to respond with confirming details. And still I hesitated.
This week, I got two more prize notifications. One purported to be from a childless Sierra Leonian widow, a born again Christian whose doctor had told her she did not have long to live, ”expecially [sic] due to my cancer and stroke”. She said she wanted to donate $15-million of her late husband’s money to a suitable charity, but needed a friendly conduit for this cash to get out of a shady bank account in the Côte d’Ivoire.
The second was from an institution trading under the name of the Coca-Cola Company, from its official address in Stanford Bridge, South London, United Kingdom. Coca-Cola was pleased to inform me that I was one of 20 people who had each won £1-million in a lottery that none of us had ever entered.
It was the declining level of the initially pompous and impeccable English that was used, I think, that made me take a closer look at what was going on. Not that I needed much prompting. The whole thing had a rum ring about it from the start.
The widow, Mrs Monica Tema, had this to say: ”The Bible made us to understand that Blessed is the hand that giveth. I took this decision because I don’t have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians. I don’t want my husband’s hard earned money to be misused by unbelievers, for their own selfish interest and in an ungodly manner.”
The Coca-Cola Company of South London was equally eager to give reasons for my unexpected windfall: ”The selection process was carried out through random selection in our computerised email selection machine (Topaz) from a database of more than 250 000 email addresses drawn from all the continents of the world,” they explained. ”This Lottery is approved by the British Gaming Board and also Licensed by the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR). In other [sic] to claim your prize winning which has been deposited to customised Courier and Security Company who has been to deliver it to your designated contact address.”
And they concluded: ”On Behalf of the staff And Members Of the COCA COLA COMPANIES Congratulates and therefore advised you to keep your winning information confidential and restrict from third Party to avoid double or false claims of your winning.”
Unlike the Widow Tema, who begs not to be contacted by phone because of her declining health and the danger of detection by eavesdropping, unchristian relatives, Coca-Cola is good enough to provide a London telephone number and contact person (Mrs Juliet Marrow, Processing Manager) but in the manner of things in this hi-tech age, the phone number is permanently unavailable.
There is a certain charm in being able to transpose a Lagos accent into written text on a personal computer. There is, at the same time, a certain menace in the ability of the senders of these friendly messages to access your email address and break into your solitary thoughts with promises of untold riches.
Some punters, I am told, do fall for these Apapa schemes and lose the entire contents of their bank accounts as a result. Me, myself, I am too much of a chicken to venture into this promised world of Eldorado, well so far, at least.