Nothin's fer free.

Over the past couple of months, I've had a few missed calls on my mobile phone, from a strange number that I deduced was in China. I didn't know anyone there, so it was even more puzzling. Like most people, I called back the number, only to be greeted by a recorded message in Chinese, which I didn't understand. I guessed the message said something to the effect of: "This numberis not in use", so it was all the more intriguing.

But last week I got an SMS message in Chinese from another China number. This was the message:

你好!这里是香港中兴集团深圳总代理您的手机中了中兴集团二等奖16.8万美元请以+861348953124陈先生

I ran this through babelfish (oh the hack I had to do to get this from my phone to my laptop in ASCII and to convert that to unicode!), and it came out as:

Hello! Here was the Hong Kong resurgence group Shenzhen general agent your handset has hit resurgence group second prize 168,000 US dollars please by +861348953124 Mr. Chen

Right.

Then I asked a couple of my colleagues at work to translate it for me, and they told me that I had apparently won some money (probably $168,000) and I was to call the number given to collect it. The word "SCAM" ran through my mind, and I quickly forgot it.

Then yesterday's newspaper carried this story. To quote:

Departing from the initial trick of sending text messages to inform mobile phone users that they had won a lottery prize, the fraudsters have also spawned novel ways to perpetrate their scams. Now, they also use missed calls to trick the victims into calling back, and a pre-recorded message — similar to the ones in the SMS scams — greets those who do.

To claim the lottery prize, the conmen would say, winners have to first pay a "government tax" of a few thousand dollars.

Behold: the new Nigerian scam.