A threatening email seems to be the latest Nigerian email scam landing in local people’s inboxes.
“Your life is in danger… track you down… live or die.”
It’s just part of a chilling email informing Cape May County’s Chester Asher that he was the target of a contract killing.
“It came out of nowhere,” said Asher.
The email instructed Asher to reply if he was ready to pay some fees to spare his life. He and another Ocean City resident received the same, identical email within the past week-and-a-half.
“They said they had been hired by someone who knew me to kill/assassinate me,” Asher said. “And you know, that’s a little scary…having your life threatened.”
Claiming, “now my men are monitoring you,” the sender warns against contacting the police -- a warning both recipients ignored.
Don’t worry for your life, though, if you get one of these emails.
“It’s a scam,” said Ocean City Police Lt. Steven Ang.
“We feel it’s a scam. We don’t feel that these people were seriously being threatened or that their lives are in danger.”
The email was sent from a Hotmail account and is filled with poor grammar.
“The best we can do -- tracing back the IP address -- it looks like it’s coming back to a Nigerian country,” Ang said.
The emails were received two days apart and to make the case even more bizarre, the people who got them live just yards away from each other.”
“It could be a coincidence,” Ang said. “It could be how they targeted a certain neighborhood.
“We believe there’s probably more of these out there.”
The victims police know about did not send any money and cops say you shouldn’t either if you get a similar email.
And if you do get one of these emails be sure to call cops, they said.
Sending this kind of email could result in harassment charges or even terroristic threats. Investigators used the recipients’ accounts to reply to the email, but so far there’s been no response.
