The Con Remains The Same (Nigerian Email Scams)

I have just received my first Nigerian email scam so I thought I'd publish this interetsing article...

Taken from The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, February 19, 2007
By Nick Galvin

In among the offers of cheap drugs, hot share market tips and penis enlargement schemes jostling daily for attention in your inbox, you will almost certainly have received "Nigerian scam" emails.

The Nigerian scam, also know as 419 fraud after the section of the Nigerian criminal code it violates, has many variants but the basis of the con remains the same.

The victim is promised millions of dollars in exchange for helping with a scheme that in itself is quasi-legal. Once hooked, the victim is persuaded to part with increasing amounts of cash to cover "administrative" fees. In the end, the fraudster disappears with the money.

Usually these "scambaiting" emails are easily recognisable and most people do the right thing, binning them immediately. However, incredibly, the scam continues to net hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This brings us to a cautionary tale from a reader, Michael (not his real name). What separates his experience from the run-of-the mill 419 scams is that the fraudsters took the extra step of finding out a lot of his personal details before contacting him.

The scam started with an email addressed personally to Michael - both his first and second name. Infuriated by this intrusion into his privacy, he did what he would normally never do and emailed back to tell "Rev F. R. James" where to stick his promise of a multi-million-dollar bequest.

"It was a stupid response," Michael says. "But I get 30 to 40 junk mails every day that I have to wade through. It was the end of a long day and I had had enough."

Another personally addressed email arrived the next day - and then the phone calls started in the early hours. "It sounded like a call centre on the other end - no one spoke - so I just slammed down the phone," he says. "It was 4am."

This was then followed up by the same calls on his mobile phone, which got the same treatment. Then, while Michael was at work, his wife received a series of calls.

"She picked up the phone and there was some person saying that they desperately wanted to speak to me," he says. "They were being really insistent and demanding. It was really scary. My wife was in tears. She was really frightened because she didn't know whether these people were down the road or overseas."

By now, Michael was seriously concerned and he took the drastic step of barring all incoming overseas calls - which is a serious inconvenience but, he says, worth it to stop the frightening messages.

Russell Smith, principal criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology, says personally addressed 419 emails were unusual but not unheard of.

"Most advanced-fee fraud attempts are not addressed personally but there [are many] data bases of personal information circulating among fraudsters," he says.

Michael's name could have come from such a hacked or stolen database. Smith said the other possibility was that the scammers were local and targeting people by collecting personal details online and from other sources. Michael runs a small business and its website has his contact details.

Smith's advice to anyone receiving 419-type emails is to delete them immediately. "Bin it, delete it and ignore it but certainly do not enter into any correspondence with these people," he says.
You've been warned.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Despite massive counterfeiting of U.S. currency and checks in Nigeria, the American law enforcement agency with principal jurisdiction, the Secret Service, has closed its office in Lagos, Nigeria. Nigerian officials said the decision has hurt efforts to crack down on criminal rings that produce the counterfeit currency and cheat thousands of Americans with online scams.

One of the most famous people to be duped is Ed Mezvinsky, a former Democratic Congressman from Iowa, who is serving a seven-year sentence for fraud after getting caught up in a series of Nigerian e-mail scams. Prosecutors say Mezvinsky used his connections to the Clintons and his son's social relationship with Chelsea to persuade people to give him money to participate in the scams. Mezvinsky traveled to Nigeria numerous times and ultimately lost more than $3 million as a victim of the scammers. Prosecutors say Mezvinsky fell particularly hard for what is known as the "black money" scam. Victims are told millions of dollars have been coated with black ink so the money could be smuggled out of Nigeria. Prosecutors say Mezvinsky fell for at least three separate "black money" schemes that he thought would bring him millions.

There are groups of people that are hitting back at these Nigerian scams. One of them is 419 Eater. Check out their website. It is really funny.

Here are some "must see" investigative video reports from ABC News

Confessions of a Scam Artist

Master vs. Mugu: Nigerian e-mail scams rip off millions of gullible Americans