I know this is a fake. I would like to know who I can report this text to. A "Government Official" is asking for help to move &18.5M out of Lybia, 30% will be for me.
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6On Information Security Stack Exchange: Whom should I report spam emails to?– FluxAug 3, 2020 at 15:23
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1 Answer
It's estimated that somewhere in the range of 70-300 billion emails are sent world wide, every day. It's also estimated that approximately 25-50% of those emails are spam. Of those, one estimate claims that 2.5% of spam emails are scams.
It's extremely unlikely that anyone will care enough, or have the bandwidth to investigate the single scam email you received among the other approximately 1 billion scam emails that were also sent that day. I'd recommend deleting it and moving on.
That being said, some countries have ways to report these types of scams. For example, the US FBI has an address where you can send messages for this specific type of scam. Australia's information can be found here. If it were me though I wouldn't waste my time.
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Not all spams are scams, so presenting spam statistics isn't useful. Aug 3, 2020 at 17:59
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1@BenVoigt - good point. I updated the number based on the amount of scams that are a subset of spams.– TTTAug 3, 2020 at 18:47
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Only 2.5% ? seems low. Guessing a significant amount of the others are phishing/malware ?– xyiousAug 6, 2020 at 20:36
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@xyious I thought so too. But in that link it does say this: "Malware, identity theft, scams, phishing – you name it. While most spam is just annoying and time-consuming, about 2.5% of it can do some serious damage." In another area of the article it says some of the numbers are from 2016, and although total spam percentage has decreased since then, it implies that targeting phishing may have increased since then.– TTTAug 6, 2020 at 20:48