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  • 2022-05-03 (xsd:date)
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  • Is the 'Jeff Green Foundation' Email Giveaway a Scam or Legit? (en)
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  • In May 2022, we received inquiries from our readers that asked if an email message from the Jeff Green Foundation was legitimate. According to the email, a philanthropist named Jeff Green had decided to give away $1 million each to 20 different lucky recipients. However, this had all the signs of a classic email scam. According to a screenshot captured by a reader, the email appeared like this: We transcribed the scam email below: A search of Twitter showed that several users were curious whether the Jeff Green Foundation email was legitimate: We didn't find any similar messages available on Facebook, but it's likely that some users were discussing the email in private posts only visible to friends. Some of the paragraphs in the Jeff Green Foundation email scam were copied and pasted from the text of a genuine letter written by a real philanthropist named Jeff T. Green. In November 2021, Green truly did pledge to try to give away more than 90 percent of his billions in wealth. However, there's no indication that Green or his foundation had anything to do with the email scam. We quickly noticed several issues with the Jeff Green Foundation message. Before the email got into the when I was 17 story from the genuine letter, several words were either capitalized or not capitalized that should have been the reverse. For example, one usage of the word I was left to be lowercase as i in the same sentence as an oddly-placed comma: My Name is Jeff Green, Below is a Link of me and what i do. Additionally, the sentence was poorly worded. The message also asked recipients to respond to privatewealth.donation@webmail.hu. The idea that a billionaire philanthropist would publish an email with such poor grammar and, at the same time, ask people to respond to a fairly generic Hungarian email address, did not scream legitimate. We reached out to a company associated with Green to see if they had been alerted to the scam that used his name. We will update this story if we receive a statement. In sum, no, the Jeff Green Foundation emails that promised $1 million each to 20 different people was not a legitimate giveaway. (en)
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