FOGGY BOTTOM – The State Department indicated that it will be disregarding a distress email it received today, purportedly from a Nigerian presidential candidate.
The email, which bears the subject line “Help! Please read and respond,” arrived in the inbox of Secretary of State John Kerry at approximately 3:37 AM. The author alleges to be Muhammadu Buhari, the opposition candidate whom many polls suggest will unseat President Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria’s impending general election.
According to the email, Buhari is in dire need of American assistance: “Dear friends, as we speak, my country is being ravished by the barbaric forces of Boko Haram. President Jonathan sits in his ivory tower and does nothing to stop the senseless slaughter of the Nigerian people. Last month, he ordered the army to postpone the presidential election in what was certainly a desperate attempt to cling to power.”
The email requests that the State Department wire Buhari the sum of $10 million to help him fund a final campaign push to oust President Jonathan from office.
“This email had all the trademarks of an Internet scam,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters in a press conference. “The down-on-his-luck Nigerian leader gag is a well-known tactic. He asks you to wire him a certain amount of money with the promise of a huge return on investment after he reclaims power.”
According to Psaki, the alleged Buhari promised the United States his cooperation on counterterrorism, economic reforms, and oil contracts for American firms if the money was wired.
“If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it probably is,” Psaki said.
The State Department credits a team of hard-working analysts for catching the scam after referring to Snopes.com.
“This was not even one of the better Nigerian email scams we discovered,” analyst Lamar Achua said. “If the scammers had any sense at all, they would have realized we would catch that Buhari is a former military dictator. They should have pretended to be a Nigerian prince.”
Critics in some corners point out that President Jonathan did indeed postpone the Nigerian elections and that his response to the Boko Haram insurgency has been tepid at best. They raise the concern that the email might indeed be a genuine plea for help.
“This email is an obvious hoax,” Psaki reaffirmed. “Scammers have been inventing ever more sophisticated and realistic ways to trick us. Last year we received an email from ‘Vice President Biden.’ He claimed he was lost and alone in Tijuana without his passport, his wallet, and one of his kidneys. Only after we had wired him emergency money did we discover it all went to the Zetas.”
Psaki said she does not know how the email ended up in Secretary Kerry’s mailbox. She confirmed that the State Department will be tightening its email filters so that future Nigerian scams go to the spam folder. This is already protocol for all other emails pertaining to sub-Saharan Africa.