Internet Scammers Blast Cincinnati With Bogus E-Mails From Gen. Petraeus: $22.6 Million Afghan Treasure Needs Ohio Hideout

Email Says General Has Loot Like Pirate

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- The message comes from a gmail account under the name General David Howell Petraeus, who is supposed to be writing from his command post in Afghanistan where U.S. and NATO forces are battling the Taliban.  The general has become a pirate with a treasure he needs to stash.  But the message is crude and clearly fake.  It contains numerous grammatical and punctuation errors.  Petraeus is a four-star U.S. Army general officer from West Point who went on to obtain an Ivy League PhD.  He doesn't write like an unschooled Arab hunched over a keyboard in an Internet cafe, a Nigerian spammer, or a Somali Long John Silver.  What's even more ridiculous: Holly Petraeus, the general's wife of 36 years, heads a Better Business Bureau (BBB) consumer education office.  Yet the email portrays this American hero as corrupt, as crooked as Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the kleptocrats who surround him.  Perhaps the email originated as psyops from the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, and was written from a cave in Pakistan.  Perhaps it is simply a scam.  It clearly is an attempt to tie the American general into Karzai's thieving regime.  Awful that gmail allows it to circulate widely.  See for yourself the bogus content -- bad grammar and all -- in this excerpt:

"Some money and gold in various currencies [$22.6 million in U.S. dollars plus 50 kilos of gold] was discovered in barrel at a farm house in (sic) during the presidential election at the Taliban strong hold during a rescuer (sic) operation in the election attack and it was agreed by staff Sgt. Kenneth Buff and I that some part of this money and gold be shared among us before informing anyone about the discovery.  this (no caps) was quite illegal thing to do but I tell you what.  No compensation will make it up for the risk we have taken our lives in this hell whole (sic) of which my brother-in-law was killed by a road side bomb last week.

"The above figure was given me as my shared to cancel this kind of money became a problem for me, so with the help of a British contact working here and his office enjoys some immunity I was able to move the money to a security company in the United Kingdom as a diplomatic consignment."

The general's wife, Holly, directs the BBB Military Line, which works with service members.  She tries to keep families from being the targets of scammers and financial fraudsters.  She tells the story of how in 1974 she and her husband got caught in a snare by buying a sports car.  It was a red Jensen-Healy that was a mechanical nightmare.  They were young, not well off, and the car moneypit drained them financially.  Lesson learned.