E-mail money scam targets 'gaeilgeorí'

OVERLY TRUSTING gaeilgeoirí beware. An as Gaeilge version of the so-called online “Nigerian scam” is doing the rounds in which an unlikely sum of money is promised to the recipient of the e-mail if only he or she sends all personal banking details to a person, usually based in Nigeria.

The e-mail is circulating with the lengthy heading, “An raibh Roghnaithe Comhghairdeas leat Seoladh R-phost a fháil £888,446.00 Ó Náisiún Aontaithe!” However, a briefer and more appropriate subject heading might be the Irish proverb “ní mar a shíltear a bhítear” (things aren’t as they seem).

A Garda spokesman said it appeared the letter was most likely a translation of a standard scam letter done using computer software. He said the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation always warns “any offer that looks too good to be true, probably is”.

Dr Michael Cronin, professor of translation studies at Dublin City University and an Irish speaker, confirmed while the letter’s Irish fluency was impressive, it was unlikely to be evidence a pocket of Irish-speaking fraudsters was operating out of the Gaeltacht.

“The funny thing about it is, it’s fairly good. There’s quite a lot of repeated mistakes in it, which means it reads like something fed into a machine translation package, but with a much higher standard than you’d normally get. It looks like somebody who speaks Irish had a look at it,” he said.

According to the e-mail, the United Nations is offering the lucky recipient £888,446 about €1 million – if they supply a bank account for the sum to rest in.

“It is funny,” said Prof Cronin. “It supposedly comes from an assistant secretary in the United Nation’s terrorism-monitoring unit, yet it says the money is being given to improve the standard of living “for people on small islands or near the continental shelf’.”

The recipient is asked to reply to a bank located in Malaysia.

Dublin-based computer security company Espion said the Irish-language version surfaced several months ago. “I sent it on to a gaeilgeoir friend when I first got it, as I thought he’d get a laugh out of it,” said managing director Colman Morrissey. Given the e-mail is in Irish, the market for such a scam would seem tiny, he added.