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. 

Ohio Businessman Scammed By Nigerian E-Mailers: Court Deletes His 3-Year Prison Sentence

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- A federal appeals court has vacated a 37-month prison sentence facing Lorain County real estate broker Anthony Ross for cashing counterfeit checks that originated in an overseas e-mail scam. The ruling by the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati is 9-pages long and includes a dissent from Judge Alice M. Batchelder of Medina County, who said the sentence was proper because Ross intended to defraud banks in cahoots with the Nigerian Internet crooks.

Ross, whose underlying conviction was left intact, owned Northshore Realty and E.A.R. Investors, companies formed to develop, sell and construct low-income housing in Lorain County. He suffered financial losses and had to file a personal bankruptcy in 2003.

Eventually, he got in contact with the scammers, whom he claimed led him on with promises of investment funds. There were at least 40 e-mails. Cleveland U.S. District Judge Ann Aldrich presided over the trial and sentencing, and will have to resentence Ross in Cleveland federal court sometime later this year. The appeals court ruling did not set a date:

"In the present case, the government offered evidence that over the course of two years Ross passed a $90,000 counterfeit check, received a suspicious and counterfeit $346,000 check in the mail, and deposited a counterfeit $5,000 check. Additionally, during that same period a counterfeit $700,000 Treasury check was mailed to his bank with instructions to be deposited in his account. the jury also considered more than fort e-mails between Ross and the 'Nigerians' and listened to Ross from the witness stand."

The court added:

"While this case presents a close evidentiary call, we do not believe Ross has met his very heavy burden for showing the evidence was insufficient. The jury chose not to believe Ross's testimony and found that there was enough circumstantial evidence of Ross's motive to commit bank fraud. Ross was in dire financial straits. Ross had filed for personal bankruptcy. Ross needed money to pay debts to keep his businesses afloat . . . The circumstantial evidence calls into doubt Ross's story that he was simply the victim on an elaborate Nigerian counterfeit check scam."