Ya I'm not going to do anything with it because I know it can't be real. Thing is I haven't been contacted by email or anything yet.
How do these people get names and addresses.
I will post here if and when I am contacted. It'll be interesting to see what they say,
There must be some information leak somewhere. The other night I received a text message in the form of those 'money needs to leave the country etc...20 million with your name on it' on my company mobile. It was about 2am! And I would be one of those types that actually try their best to guard personal and contact information as best I can, it's obviously not possible in this day and age?
But with regard to your cheque, I would say keep it for record or if you hear anything in media in future , don't ever answer any correspondance from these guys, you are only letting them know that an address was correct etc if you do. They work on percentages whereby a return of 4-5% is enough to net then the massive profits they make from scams. They literally have a whole organisational structure for this.
An typical setup would be in some African country:
* groups of teenagers scouring social networks, sending emails to validate addresses, basically gathering possible information on victims
* they pass on this info up the chain to the guys that prepare the emails/letters etc (better English but not always great as we have seen with grammatical errors)
* if a reply is received, it goes up the chain again, to someone trained to get you to bite...
and so on and so fort. There are even levels above this where they have people that can pretend to be law enforcement and government officials, all designed to convince you that what you are doing in legitimate.
It is a well oiled and very profitable enterprise
sadly there are a lot of vulnerable people out there now who are easily taken in by scams like this if indeed it is one, but will be very surprised if it ain't.