My brother in law owns and runs a small bio-chem testing lab. My wife works for him. All of his customers are companies that make cosmetics and the like, and the government dictates that they must get a certain percentage of their product "lots" sampled with the results being made available to the FDA.
Last week he had a man walk into his office and ask him if he could test these strips of paper the size of Monopoly money. My b-i-l then asked him what he wanted it tested for. The man then explained that he was approached via email that he had a distant relative die and he was named in the will. The amount he was to inherit was 2,000,000. The processing fee for this was $8500. So he transferred $8500 to these people and he received a box full of these strips of blank paper. He tried bringing it to a bank but they told him to go away, so he wanted them tested to see what's on them. Seriously!
Like I said, if ANYONE else had told me this I would never believe it, just like most all of you probably won't and I can understand why. Are people who are smart enough to have $8500 in the bank THAT dense??? I guess there are, and that's why the "Nigerian Oil Minister" was able to run his scam as long as he did.
BTW, my b-i-l didn't do any testing!
