Aforesaid?

Dear Sir/Madam,
 
It gives me a great pleasure to invite you to the forth coming international seminar which the International Institute for Global Care (IIGC) is exited to be hosting in February 28th to March 5th 2011 at Webster hall New York City  USA, and from March 7th to 11th at Dakar City Hall. Dakar - Senegal.
  
The theme of the forth coming seminar are; Racism and Human Right. Delegates who are interested to make a paper presentation are advice to make a summary presentation on the above subject.
  
On behalf of the Organizing Committee, I request you to kindly extend your cooperation by giving wide publicity to the aforesaid workshop by sharing this invitation among your staff, members or relatives for their
active participation in the workshop.
  
Note: the I.I.G.C. will be providing all delegates with to and fro Air ticket and also visa’s guidance for the seminar purpose. Looking forward for your cooperation and support for the success of the workshop.

Registration is open now! Contact the organizing secretary Mrs. Christina G. Humphrey for more information.

Email: event_secretary_iigc@globomail.com
  
See you in the Seminar.

Regards

Miss Brenda Charles

brenda_charles@globomail.com

**********************************

The preceding is a verbatim copy of an email I received a while back. Some of you may have received this or a similar one. I fell for reading it because of the title of the supposed organization. In my search for geospatially related work, I've applied to a lot of companies who could be associated with such an outfit. I've also joined various groups, such as on LinkedIn, that have leanings toward things global.

I was immediately made suspicious by the slovenly spelling and grammar: "a great pleasure" and "exited" to name a few. Beside all that, it was unfathomable why any such organization would invite me to an international conference, even if I was an erstwhile wanna-be GIS Tech.

I did a little checking, and found that there while there is indeed an email service called globomail.com, (another red flag: wouldn't a large enough organization have its own domain for email?) there is no evidence of the existence of any International Institute for Global Care. That's not to say that there isn't plenty of discussion of the IIGC - lots of people have gotten this email, and have attempted to verify the seeming source.

This certain scam is somewhat refreshing from the usual in that it doesn't immediately ask you to send money somewhere or reveal personal and/or financial information. I'm sure that comes after you respond to the "exited"  Ms. Charles.

I was originally going to post this email on The Punctuator!, but I decided that it was a perfect example of nincompoopery on the internet: incompetent scammers, and the (no doubt more than a few) gullible sorts who fall for these things.