Nigerian scams are so old in net years they’re eligible for Social Security at this point, and yet people are still sending millions and millions of dollars in money orders to Nigeria and elsewhere in response to these silly emails.
Where does this endless stream of gullible and greedy victims, who apparently have never read a newspaper, or a magazine story about these scams (much less online warnings) come from? The net has been around for long enough at this point that for someone not to know it would almost require active avoidance of all print and electronic news media.
From what I understand, they come from all walks of life. I heard about an attorney who sent hundreds of thousands of dollars and was still not convinced his ship would not come in.
Greedy? Possibly. I chalk it up to gullible and too trusting.
They are the people who are absolutely sure they have a legitimate offer. The people who try to tell them otherwise are just jealous they didn’t get it.
People are just plain easy to scam. There’s always a subset that will just never learn.
Forget the Nigerian scam. There are people that are still falling for the travellers’ classic scams like “I’ve got some leftover asphalt and noticed your driveway was cracked.” People are still falling for scams used in “The Flim-Flam Man”!
My own mother is horribly trusting. She just doesn’t understand the possibility that there could be people out there that would actually lie in order to get money out of her.
The easiest people to con are those who know for sure they can spot a con artist.
Awareness of the Nigerian scam phenomenon might be confined to those who follow cyberculture. Lots of busy people, however, go online for professional reasons only. Have there been any investigative reports in more traditional media? TV? Magazines?
There have been reports on the news, but certainly not enough of them to catch everyone.
The Nigerian Scam is only a refinement on the Spanish Prisoner scam of 80+years ago. There are always people who don’t notice the red flags and who give it a shot.
What clued me in the first time I saw it was the amount of money. If it were a few thousand, it might have seemed plausible, but I couldn’t even begin to think why in hell some stranger was going to trust me with millions of dollars.
There is a variatation of this scam involving supposed lottery wins. All you are asked to do is submit something like £18 for “transaction fees” . Of course this isn’t much but, if enough people fall for this, the crooks can rake in thousands.
I have friends that I consider intelligent - for the most part. They have college degrees, they have professions, they read papers and watch the news and even read the occasional book.
Yet some of these friends still send me links about getting free money from Bill Gates, for free clothes from The Gap and countless number of other Urban Legends.
What can I tell you…I guess like the old expression goes, “there is a sucker born every minute.”
There are plenty of stupid people “on the 'net.” In the oooooooold days, when you had to walk to the internet 10 miles through the snow barefoot, and had to know the secret handshake and password in Cuneiform, the people on the 'net actually knew stuff.
Not now. In the dark ages of the “AOLTeenF$#@Wit” Model of Internet Commerce, every mouthbreather with a mailbox of an AOL CDROM and a BestBuys EasyPay plan can be up and running on the 'net with a minimum of effort.
There are plenty of greedy, unethical people on the 'net. They’ll cheerfully steal if no-one is looking, if they don’t know the victim, if the victim “deserves it”, if the stuff is (or should be) “free”.
The intersection of these two sub-populations of ‘netizens ensures a healthy future for the practitioners of the Nigerian Scam and all its’ variations.
Greed and foolishness are pretty common among humans. I worked with a security guard who fell for the pigeon drop, one time (one of the things he was supposed to be watching to be sure that no one was pulling on the customers at the mall where we worked). Mind you, the pigeon drop had to be explained to me three times, when I was in high school, before I understood how it worked, because the whole premise seems so stupid I could not see how anyone would ever fall for it, yet here was a guy whose job it was to watch for that very thing who fell for it.
I not exactly following why this part needs (logically) to occur.
The Catch:
As with all scams there is always a catch. After all three agree to the plan, one of the con artists says we should all deposit an amount of money equal to our share of the found money and let one of us hold it until the 30 days is up. The con artists will manipulate the victim to go along with the suggestion
Besides gullibility and greed, Nigerian scams also rely on flattery. They make the people involved feel like important, respected businessmen. Messing with people’s egos can be a powerful thing.