Ghana scam and direct deposit scam?

Question

My father has been talking to a girl who calls herself Linda Owusu. She claims to be from Germany and living in the US away from her son. She recently found out that her father has left her with a large sum of gold that was left into a company that she has to pay the fee that the father promised the company that would be paid upon the retrieval of the bars of gold.

She claims she is now in Ghana and cannot come back to the states until she gets up the money to get the bars out. She knows he has no money so I'm not sure what her game is just yet. I decided to google her name finding a picture of her on the search. It wasn't a picture of Linda but of a Canadian named Josie Ann Miller.

I showed my father and he was initially shocked and upon confronting her she apologizes for lying to him about hiding that she was actually a porn star under the name of Josie. Now she somehow has found an investor to get the gold out but needs to deposit it into my father's account (remember he has$ 0.00 in the account).

She wants him to send it back to the company holding the gold so she can bring it back. I cannot figure out how she is scamming him but I am 99% sure that this is a scam.

Answer 1

Of course, it is a scam. Regardless of how the scam might work, you already know that the person on the other end is lying, and you also know that people in trouble don't contact perfect strangers out of the blue by e-mail for help, nor do they call up random phone numbers looking for help.

Scammers prey on the gullibility, greed, and sometimes generosity of the victims.

As to how this scam works, the money that the scammer would be depositing into your father's account is not real. However, it will take the bank a few days to figure that out. In the mean time, your father will be sending out real money back to the scammer. When the bank figures out what is going on, they will want your father to pay back this money.

Answer 2

It used to be Nigerian royalty, now it's Ghanaian porn stars. Great.

This is a bog-standard 419 scam. It's probably the most lucrative single swindle in the world. It's always hard to get people to believe they have been tricked, but don't let your dad participate.

Answer 3

The reason this sort of question gets asked over and over again is because it's initially difficult to comprehend how you can possibly be scammed if you have no money in your bank account. Perhaps this would make it easier to understand:

Someone approaches you in the parking lot of a mall and says,

Excuse me, complete stranger, please take this $100 bill and go buy me a pair of $50 shoes at the shoe store. Then go buy whatever you'd like with the rest of the money.

Sounds like a good deal, right? The $100 bill is counterfeit. If it were not, the person would buy the shoes themselves. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

Answer 4

It's a scam.

Here's someone who paid "Josie" 2000 pounds and lost it all

Here's a Google search result list of how this softcore porn actor, Josie Ann Miller, is being used as the face and name of scams

Answer 5

Yes, this is a scam. Tell your dad not to pay any money.

There will likely be a large deposit in his account, but if he withdraws the money from his account, the bank will come after him looking for the money when the transfer to his account is reversed.

Answer 6

So Linda/Josie's initial plan was to have your dad pay money to (supposedly) help her get the gold chest. After he would have paid, there would have been another complication, and more yet (someone to bribe, a plane ticket to buy, transport to arrange, customs to handle, whatever, the list would last as long as there's money to take). Even if he does not have much money, the appeal of his share of the treasure could have been enough to tempt him to spend money he can't, or borrow, etc.

Once "she" found out that he doesn't have any money and/or is apparently not willing to send any, "she" switched to a different scam: she would send him a large check, have him deposit it on his bank account, transfer most of the money (minus his generous share) to "her". Once the money is irreversibly transferred, the check will bounce. End result: 0 in the account before the transaction, minus a lot afterwards.

It's quite simple: if an e-mail from a perfect stranger includes any of the following keywords, it's a scam:

• gold
• million
• Nigeria
• Ghana
• share
• get out of the country
• widow
• deceased
• inheritance

Answer 7

Sadly, people with millions of dollars rarely give it away to complete strangers that they found at random on the Internet in exchange for trivial efforts. Anyone who claims to be willing to give you millions of dollars for just about nothing in return is almost certainly pulling a scam. It doesn't matter if you can't figure out how they're going to cheat you. They have plan.

Just because your father has no money doesn't mean he can't be robbed. The scammer is almost surely planning to move some money around, and leave your father with a debt that he will be legally obligated to pay. She'll then take off with the money. (Of course you figured out that the picture is fake. It may not even be a pretty young girl -- that may well just be a persona the scammer created to appeal to your father. It might really be a fat, balding old man.)

Your father would be smarter to sit in his back yard and wait for money to fall from the sky.

Answer 8

The scammer is definitely up to something fishy. He (it's certain that the she is a he) may deposit some money into your father's account to gain his trust. After which, he will propose to come meet your dad. That's where the scamming begins. He will come up with a story about flight, VISA issues, or a problem he has to solve before coming over.

Another is that he can use your dad's empty account to receive monies he scammed off people. That way there's no direct link with him and his other victim.