"BUSINESS PROPOSAL!!‏", how fake is this scam?

Pretty simple! I marked it as phishing and now it's gone :) Thanks guys!

I mostly just report those (if I even get anything like that) as phishing scams. One of my online friends gets Blizzard WoW account things saying her account's in some type of trouble, and she doesn't even have an account.

If you were wanting to know more about what these were, here you go.

These are "advance fee fraud" scams. They are often called "Nigerian Scams" and "419 Scams" as the majority come from Nigeria, and 419 originates from Nigeria's criminal code dealing with fraud.

They generally begin with some crazy proposition, such as that someone died and left millions to you, an ATM card from some bank you never heard of has millions on it for you, a shady business man wants you to hold his money for some time (and you get a cut), and the list goes on.

Generally the scammers try to make the deal seem as legit as possible. Their fake documents can sometimes be of rather high quality (also sometimes of rather low quality too, as in you can tell that the man's head in the picture is from someone else).

Now here's where the scam kicks in. After you converse with them for some time, they will finally say that they are ready to send the cash, but some complications have arose. There is now some reason they cant send it, such as someone needing to be bribed, bank fees, etc. The scammer now requires your help, he wants you to send him some cash. He also wants his cash sent a certian way. That way is via money wiring services such as MoneyGram or Western Union. By using those services, the scammer gets your money, and there is no way you can get it back; you can't reverse a wire transfer done by them. They try to get as much out of you as they can, and once they think you have been taken for what they can get out of you, they never contact you again.

Now you might think that nobody would fall for something like this, but there are enough people out there that do fall for this. Sometimes there are variants of the scam that make you think that you are sending money to help someone or some other good cause.

Now that's this scam in a nutshell. Generally you should just delete these, you can also forward them to your government (spam@uce.gov in the USA). You could also have some fun by tricking the scammer into thinking that you are interested. For more information on the world of scambaiting and advance fee fraud in general, go here.

Have fun and stay safe.