How does this “Nigerian Scam” work?
There are a couple of things to note:
- You don’t have to be VERY successful to make this work, The US to Nigeria exchange rate is pretty good, and the cost of sending an email is nearly zero.
B. Some of these guys a GOOD. A cow-orker got involved in a mail order exchange where they sent him mail order coupons (think traveller’s check), these documents were full color, had watermarkings and looked 100% authentic. The story was somethign along the lines of: "We’re in a hurry, we’ll give you $2500 to stay a weekend in your timeshare that would normally cost $500…here, we’ll pay you up front an extra amount, please return some of it to us. He didn’t fall for it, but the documentation sure appeared authentic.
An acquaintance of mine just received a check from a man she met on the 'net. He claimed he was a contractor from Chicago, working as an independent contractor for a company located in Canada, on a jobsite in Nigeria. He was to get paid around $20k after the work was complete. The check was drawn on a Canadian bank and no bank in Nigeria would cash it for him. He sent it to her to deposit into her own account then wire it to him in $3,000 increments (max for wire transfers?)
She called the FBI instead. They were tickled that they actually got someone to call them before they got scammed and lost a ton of money.
Re: Pigeon drop.
I still don’t get it. How do they get the mark to part with his/her cash? Why wouldn’t the mark just say “OK, we’ll meet back here in thirty days and see what happened?” From the link it looks like the scammers are saying “We’ll leave the money with this lawyer and see what happens in thirty days. Oh, and give us some of your money too.” There must be more than that.
In order to get the mark’s money, they have to get the mark to give them money.
This “security” money is the way they do it. (This is also why it took three tries before I understood the scam: it makes no sense to give anyone any money if the “found” money is being held by a neutral third party. I still do not understand how anyone falls for it.) A variation of this has one of the scammers suggest that the mark hold the money. They each place money in the envelope and seal it, then use a bit of sleight of hand to give the mark a different envelope containing newspaper or other paper cut to the size of dollar bills while they walk off with the original envelope. In this case, I can at least see how they might lull someone into going along with it since the mark is being asked to hold the cash, but it still makes no sense to me that anyone should be putting their own money into the pot since the only money to be had is the “found” money.
I can only imagine that they’re the same people who might fall for a lot of other scams. If you’re liable to fall for a Nigerian scam, you probably are a target for many other scams. But having an email address makes you a target for some guy in Africa. I don’t watch much TV, but the Nigerian scams don’t have a very big profile in the print media, and probably not much on the airwaves.
I too have wondered how there is anyone left who would fall for it.
The one that surprises me more though is the one where they tell you that you have won the Canadian lottery (or Irish, or Spanish, etc.) and that all you have to do is pony up XXX dollars to claim your prize.
Mom (a bank teller) said it broke her heart when one of her elderly customers came in and had lost nearly 20 grand. I guess all of these scams prey on our basic greed. I mean, c’mon, didn’t it occur to the old gent that he hadn’t *played *the Canadian loterry? I think, even in my 80s, I would have said “Gee, how could I win something I have never played…”
The earliest documents of the “Spanish Prisoner” version of scam refer to poor (but fabulously wealthy) political prisoners of Phillip II – so “80+ years,” while accurate, but a little conservative. It’s been an old con for four and a half centuries. 
I let rooms to students and advertise in online classifieds, and nearly every time I post an ad, I get people trying to rook me with similar scams. They’re not very hard to spot. Here’s my favourite attempt:
I laughed at this last paragraph and showed it to my girlfriend, who thought I was just trying to make her jealous. Even after I explained why it was obvious to me that this person didn’t exist and that the catch was coming, my girlfriend thought it sounded plausible. “Oh, boy! A real live model! A successful one! And she wants to share a house with 5 strangers! How attractive!” Too attractive, of course.
I predicted to my girlfriend what the next e-mail would consist of, and was, of course, right on the money:
Of course, the cheque is phony, and after converting it to cash and sending the lion’s share on, I’d be stuck holding the bag, never again to hear from “Morine.”
I larfed about this one to one of the guys who was staying here, and he admitted that he’d actually been taken in by pretty much the same thing, when he was selling a “parts” car online. Very attractive offer, phony cheque, you seem like a nice fellow and I can trust you, please just send the balance back. He’d gotten as far as taking the cheque to the bank, and received a call from the RCMP a couple of days later, where they were nice enough to let ihim know that he was being taken without making him feel like too much of a rube.
A version of this type of switcheroo was depicted in an early scene of the movie The Sting.
Here’s another vote for people, even those thought to be intelligent, having their judgment clouded by greed. In Kurt Eichenwald’s book “The Informant,” he writes about Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive, falling for the Nigerian scam, but it was in the early 90’s, and arrived as a fax. Whitacre was smart enough and greedy enough to embezzle millions of dollars from ADM through kickbacks, but was too greedy to realize when he was being scammed. I remember a part of the book where Whitacre was convinced that his contact was getting ready to deliver. Never happened.
This is a great study of what happens if you respond to one of these e-mails:
http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/thespamreport/0,39025001,10002928,00.htm
Well, sure; they knew how to hook up modems and such. Doesn’t mean they knew anything about anything else. I know plenty of computer nerds and they aren’t any brighter than the average bulb.
The internet is a haven for scam artists merely because you can get to so many people so easily. You can E-mail ten million people in a minute. Can’t make that many phone calls in your whole life.
I’m not sure how this works.
I read somewhere as a teen that most scams work by making the mark believe that he or she is scamming the con artist.
So, any time you feel you’re getting a deal that’s too good to be true - it’s going to turn out to be a scam, right? I’ve been approached by a number of con artists (I presume) and have never felt that my rule of thumb, here has steered me wrong. Of course my rule works by spotting a scam, not spotting the scam artist.
Anyways, I’ve always felt that the success of things like the pigeon drop, Nigerian scam, and such all work because a lot of people will be thrilled by the idea of getting something for nothing, or that they’re putting one over on someone else.
Heh. I received the same offer (4x) as Larry Mudd’s friend upon listing my old van for sale. Hmmm. Someone wants to send me money to have an '85 truck shipped overseas to a willing buyer? :dubious: If you’d like to watch a good movie on con artists, rent House of Games.
Yeah. Some guys have a great site which is full of entertaining stories. Some even get the scammers to send them money for bullshit expenses. The scammers get so greedy thinking they have hooked the fish that they’re ready to send money, thinking they’re making an “investment”.
Supposedly the scambaiters send the money to charity.
I am afraid that there are a lot of people around who are prepared to break the law if they think they can make money out of it. This happens even when the scammers tell the mark that the money that they want help to shift is stolen or otherwise misappropriated. The mark will suspend will still try and get their cut . In other word , straight greed.
Just a slight hijack, but last week there was a programme on TV about shoplifting. The most stolen item from shops in the UK are Gillette Mk3 razors. As an experiment (in collaboration with Gillette) they set up a stall in an open-air market and started selling them at half the regular price. The packaging clearly stated “only to be sold in retail shops” and they even had a pretend customer point this out to other buyers and say that these were probably stolen. Even so most people bought the razors with no qualms that they were buying stolen goods. So it is this greed that the Nigerian scammers rely on to part people from their money.
Well, about 10 years back when i was a young teen, my dad recieved a Nigerian scam through - get this - actual postal mail.
He showed the letter to me, and asked me what i thought. My reply:
“Sounds like a good offer.”
I just chalk it up to being a trustworthy kid. At least my dad was smart.