Because I'm still a little overwhelmed from Holiday Party Season (along with the continuing Hip Surgery Recovery Season), I'm just here to share my amusement with this otherwise depressing testament to the corruption of the handful of global supercorporations that exploit each of us daily.
At Siemens, Bribery Was Just a Line Item
[Siemens'] telecommunications unit was awash in easy money. It paid $5 million in bribes to win a mobile phone contract in Bangladesh ... [and] also made $12.7 million in payments to senior officials in Nigeria for government contracts.
The most tragic part of all this, even more than Siemens' strategic enrichment of Saddam Hussein before his fall, is that they were duped into making those payments to the Nigerian officials by sweet-talking e-mails proposing a joint effort to secure much greater sums being held in probate.
How many more innocent, hard-working folks must be lured into clearly shady transactions for nefarious purposes before The Internet Police finally clamp down on these wiseacre Nigerians?
7 comments:
My friend worked at the currency exchange for many years and apparently the bank/lottery scam has been going on since back in the snail mail days. The people who often fell for it were the elderly, I am not sure how many little old ladies she refused to serve because she knew they were being played. Some of them had a hard time accepting that they were in fact being scammed. So sad this crap still goes on and will likely never end.
The title of this post gave me an immature chuckle!
The manager of the bank near my old job was named Dick Siemen. Legal name changes aren't that expensive!
Hey, LiteralDan, go here for your Secret Santa Stalker:
http://unmitigated.typepad.com/unmitigated/2008/12/spin-cycle-who-doesnt-want-a-stalker-for-christmas.html
Interesting post. Going to check out your link.
I'll surely go to hell for this in the middle of Hanukkah/Christmas, but how hard could it be to shut those pesky Nigerians down? They can't have that many computers, can they?
So, what you're telling me is that I can stop waiting for them to deposit the 2 million dollars in my bank account?
bummer.
From what I hear, they are highly educated, and very intelligent, but don't have anywhere to work. Hence, the scamming.
("Wiseacre" slayed me, by the way.)
There might be a little something for you on my blog (specifically in the post titled "Community").
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