–==PC==–

I got this today:

FROM: MRS ALICE BENSON
Geerting To You

With due resperct and humblelity. I am Mrs.ALICE BENSON. from Tunisia but now undergoing medical treatment. I was married to MR. BENSON. who worked with a cocoa company in ABIDJAN for nine years, before he died in the year 2002. We were both married for eleven years without children.

He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of $ 6.2 million deposited in a company here in Cote D’ Ivoire. And he daposited it as family valuebles not as money. I will send you the contact details of the company as soon as you indicate your interest.

Recently, my Doctor told me that I will die soon due to my cancer illness. Having known my condition and believing the doctor I have decided to donate this fund to avoid total loss to church, Less privilege, or better still a Christian individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein.

This money should be used to help churches, orphanages ,widows and propagating the Gospel and to ensure that the house of God is maintained. Please do not fail to spread the funds across the globe especially AFRICA as soon as you receive the money.

I took this decision because I don’t have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are fighting over the properties and I don’t want my husband’s hard earned money to be misused by their greedy attitude. I don’t want a situation where this money will be used in an UNGODLY manner, hence the reason for taking this bold decision. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact information of the company.you can rich me through my private email box(mrsalice_benson2008@yahoo.cn)fosecurity reasons

God bless you.
Yours, Sincerely.
Mrs.Alice Benson

The whole email is funny, but the funniest thing is that Mrs. Benson who lives in Tunisia has a yahoo.cn (China) email id. Yahoo DomainKeys verified that this email was sent from s_alice_11benson@yahoo.cn. Nice try, Mr. Cha Fung.

I have got similar emails earlier too.

P.S.

A Google search tell me somebody received the same email with French email id too.

As I wrote recently, Infosys is very concerned about the increasing salaries of its mid-level employees. But an article in IndiaTimes reports that:

The directors of the country’s second largest IT company, Infosys, saw an 81 per cent jump in their cash compensation in the fiscal year 2007-08.

According to the company’s annual report, the cash compensation to Infosys directors went up to Rs 10.45 crore during the year ended March 31, 2008 compared with Rs 5.76 crore a year ago.

At Infosys, the compensation includes basic salary, allowances and taxable value of perquisites.

The Bangalore-based IT major paid Rs 4.19 crore as commission to its non-executive directors, which was a 135 per cent increase over the previous year’s Rs 1.78 crore, according to the company’s 2007-08 annual report.

The increase in commission was high despite the rupee appreciation against the dollar. The non-executive/independent directors at Infosys include Deepak M Satwalekar, Prof Marti G Subramanyam, Sridar Iyengar, Claude Smadja, David L Boyles and Dr Omkar Goswami.

Anothing interesting fact is that even though the dollar has gained against the rupee, no company is adjusting the paycuts (or no hikes) for employees that they made recently citing the reason of rupee appreciation. Now they are focusing on the recession in US although it has been reported from multiple sources that the recession has not affected the IT industry.

From an Economic Times article,

Country’s two largest software exporters, Infosys Technologies and Wipro Technologies, anticipate wage pressures might not only slash their margins but also prevent them from maintaining their competitive advantage.

…

“Wages in India are increasing at a faster rate than in the United States, which could result in increased costs for companies seeking to employ technology professionals in India, particularly project managers and other mid-level professionals,” Infosys said in its recent annual filing to American market regulator Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

…

Wipro has also cited wage pressure as a business risk in its latest annual filing to the SEC.

You will find these statements ironic if you read another article that came in the Times of India:

IT giant Infosys’s human resources head T V Mohandas Pai takes home the highest salary and bonus among all the board of directors of the company, including chairperson Nandan M Nilekani and chief executive officer S Gopalakrishnan.

According to Infosys’s recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Pai receives a salary of $82,033 and a bonus of $3,08,625 in a year, the highest among the 15 members of the board, the firm’s The Board is chaired by the firm’s chief mentor N R Narayana Murthy while one of the co-founders and director Nandan M Nilekani is the co-chairperson.

While Nilekani receives $51,414 salary and $1,22,841 as bonus, Narayana Murthy does not take home any of them but $1,25,000 in annual compensation.

I think it is debatable whether it is actually the low and mid level employee salaries or the executive level salaries (and huge bonuses) that is the real “business risk”.

Free Press Releases reports

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services recently announced a new ruling allowing holders of F1 visas to remain in the United States until the beginning of their employment, provided they have been accepted on an H1B visa.

More details here.

Last day I received an offer to make an easy million dollars. Since I am a very generous person I am going to share it with you.

My Dear,

I am Mrs. Mayi Seka,from the Republic of Cote D’Ivoire in
West Africa. I lost my husband a couple of months ago. My
Husband was a serving director of the Cocoa exporting
board until his death. He was assassinated by the rebels
following the ongoing political uprising here in my
country. Before his death he deposited the sum of
US$8.500.000(Eigth Million Five Hundred thousand United
States dollars),here in a security company which was for
the importation of cocoa processing machine.

Note,according to my late husband,the money is in a trunk
box and he did not disclose to the security company the
real content of the box for the safety of the money
according to him, he decleard to the security company that
the box contains a family valuables.

I want you to do me a favour,to help me invest this money
into a good business line after retreiving the trunk box
from the security company for the future benefit of our
both family. I will offer you 15% of the total sum for
your humanly assistant after the retreiving of the box
from the security company.

I have plans to do investment in your country,like real
estate and industrial production. This is my reason for
writing to you. Please if you are willing to assist me and
my son who is seriously sick now in the hospital, indicate
your interest in replying soonest.

Meanwhile I would like you to keep this transaction
confidential for safety reason.

Best Regards,
Mrs. Mayi Seka

In case you are interested, please contact Mrs. Mayi Seka at her home address :

Mrs.Mayi Seka
Abidjan-Cote D’Ivoire
West Africa

A Google search on this turned this up. Scroll to the end of the page.

I can’t imagine anybody will fall for this. But if somebody thinks that it is worth his/her time to send this email to people, then I guess there should atleast a few people who might have responded. I have received several variations of this over the past several years and never once did I think this could real. Once I received an email like this:

Dear Friend,

This letter might come to you as a surprise as we have not met before,but I believe that you would be compelled to help me after going through the contents of this letter. My name is Mr Samuel Richard Duke, a divorce, I am a Zimbabwean. I am a farmer in Zimbabwe. Basically, I was involved in Agricultural production, until August (2003), when the government of Robert Mugabe decided to seize all farm-land(s) owned by whites in Zimbabwe (without compensation). He (Robert Mugabe) did not stop at that he also went on to expel all White farmers in Zimbabwe.

He implored the services of his war veterans to undertake his seizure.The war veterans have been accused (correctly) of being behind the violent occupation of white-owned commercial farms in which an estimated 70,000 farm workers have been displaced. At least,over hundreds white farmers and black settlers have been killed since the farm invasion began in February 2000 Link{www.guardian.co.uk/weblog/special/0,10627,536901,00.html}Although we know that we are taking a great risk by staying here in Zimbabwe. At the Moment, our phone lines are bugged, and all our movements are being monitored by Zimbabwean (Robert Mugabe’s)secret Police.

Therefore email is the safest means of communication for now. We have taken our case to the United Nations and even with the threats of transactions and the subsequent sanctions from the West against the Zimbabwean authorities, Robert Mugabe still remains adamant. He is insisting that our farm land (some of which we bought with our money and most of which We inherited from our fathers) belongs to the (his) government of Zimbabwe. Since I could not keep the money in Zimbabwe, I used the services of a Diplomatic Courier Company to move this money (registered as official documents) out of Zimbabwe to Abroad. At present, my money totaling US$17,750,000(seventeen million,seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

The fund is in oversea and hopefully it would be paid into an offshore account. Can you help me? Are you trustworthy? Can you handle this money? Are you capable of handling this money? If you can, please contact me All you need to do is to claim this money from the Courier Company. For your assistance, you will be entitled to 20% of the total sum. You are also obliged to help/advise on the proper and most convenient way of investing this money in your country, hopefully, You will consider this request and respond positively.

Yours sincerely,

Mr Samuel Richard Duke.

Just for fun I replied to the email asking for more details. A prompt reply came as follows:

Hello,

Thanks for your quick response.Am sorry for the communication gap,my yahoo bus has being have singing in problem.I am willing to proceed with you as long as we both can understand each other. My main concern is that, can I trust you with my money without the fear that as soon as you get your hands on it you will turn around and disappear.
It is true that a transaction of this magnitude cannot be realized without trust, but I hope that at the end we both will get what we want out of this transaction.
For me the peace of knowing that my money is no longer dormant and can start yielding some interest and also the opportunity for me to live this country and for you the 25% which I will be offered for your time and assistance in this venture.
The money which am asking you to assist me in claiming is in cash inside a trunk box which I have deposited in a security company in Europe.
What you are required to do is very simple and straight forward.
For you to claim the box, I will need to write a power of attorney and for this I need your Full name, Address and phone numbers.
After I have written the PA,I will then give you the contact of the company for you to contact them and arrange for the release/delivery of the box to you.
It is most likely that the company may required you to come to there office and sign the necessary release documents before they can facilitate delivery.
This is also advantageous since it provides you the opportunity to confirm that the content of the box is intact.

Before we go further, I would like to know a bit about you,

how old are you?

What is your profession?

Finally would you be able to travel for this venture?

If not you can as well as let me know so that you will have to arrange with the security company to make the delivery to any chosen address of yours.
Please I want to stress another point which is that I want this venture to remain confidential until the box is secured and the money safely put out in your account or any of your business account. On no circumstance is any third party to know about this transaction without my consent.

Please respond so that we can proceed further.

Regards,

Mr Richard Duke.

At first I thought of replying with some bogus info to see how they will proceed, but later I decided not for pursue it any further (having seen too many Hollywood movies where practical jokes turn into nightmares ).

If you don’t know how this scam works, see this. It is also known as 419 fraud or Nigerian money offer.

The Jolt Award Winners have been announced.

I had heard about this news before but couldn’t find any sources online to confirm it. So here it is.

Faced with imminent recession in the United States, Indian IT services companies with major exposure to the North American markets are likely to cut the onsite allowances of employees deployed at clients’ offices abroad by 25 to 30 per cent from April 1, 2008.

Not surprisingly, the companies mentioned here are TCS, Infosys and Wipro.

Infosys pays a per diem of $45 (around Rs 1,780) currently to its onsite employees. Now, there is a proposal to reduce it to $35 per day (around Rs 1,380) — a Rs 400 cut per day — according to sources.

…

Wipro, on the other hand, is hiring more local talent at client locations to reduce deployment of staff from India for onsite assignments.

Recently Wipro Chairman Azim Premji had said: “If we hire people locally, it will displace people we send from here on H1B visas. So net-net, it will not mean an extra cost to us.” If this happens, there will be fewer plum jobs for the boys in India.

TCS pays Euro 1,900 per month to each onsite employee in Europe. “We have been told that the per diem rate for the US is being revised. But the per diem for onsite employees in Europe will not change,” a TCS employee said on condition of anonymity.

Obviously, this is not good for the employee morale. But does anybody even care ?

Freep.com reports that Indians are the fastest growing illegal immigrants in the Unites States of America. The news, if true, is astounding. The website doesn’t site any sources or links to the actual study, but just says

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates that there are 270,000 unauthorized Indian natives in the United States — a jump of 125% since 2000 and the largest percentage increase from any nation with more than 100,000 illegal immigrants in the United States.

Another national immigration expert, Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center, estimated that the number of illegal Indians is even higher, at 400,000 people.

Another interesting point in the article is

Indians are among the most affluent ethnic groups in the United States, with a median household income that is 62% higher than the figure for all U.S. households.

Read the complete article here. Have a look at the comments too.

Patni was always known for its low salaries and bad HR practices. Now they added another feather to their colorful cap with this.

Goel’s base salary was $23,310, about half the $44,000 that Patni had said it would pay on the visa application…

Last year, Patni paid $2.4 million to 607 H-1B visa workers after a Labor Dept. investigation uncovered systematic underpayment of wages.

Well done Patni.

The books:

The complete list is here.