This. That guy is greedy and STUPID.
and THIS.
Alarm bells, flashing lights, etc should have definitely gone off in this lawyer’s mind. I have no idea how Nigeria deals with estate taxes, but in my state, the heirs do not pay inheritance tax. The estate pays it, along with other claims if any, prior to distributing the assets.
All I can figure here is this guy saw what he thought was the potential for a big fee and got excited enough to ignore obvious signs of the scam. My guess is that he probably doesn’t do estate work in this country, much less in Nigeria, and allowed himself to accept things at face value rather than doing his due diligence. He then compounded his stupidity by sucking his own clients into the scam…even if he believed everything else as he claims he did, he had to know that brokering an unsecured loan between his clients was an obvious conflict of interest that was very likely to end poorly for all involved.
Nelson: “ha, ha!”. 
I follow the dictum of if it sounds too good to be true, it is. I get at least one or two a week phishing me. Every once in a while I will get one that sounds legitimate. I send those back asking for a retainer and that I will start work on the case after it clears in about 20 days. Never hear back from those guys.
Substitute “phone call” with “quick Google search” and you’re describing all of your own posts.
You liked to pick on the fat kid in gym class, didn’t you?
Ha ha, don’t get me started on YOU.
That would be like picking on the crybaby in kindergarten.
I generally point and laugh at these suckers myself, but these scammers can be pretty persuasive. I recall a millionaire in Hawaii who fell for it. He lost a good chunk of money and could have just kept quiet and eaten his shame, but he went public in the press with what happened and endured the ridicule so others would be warned. (This was in pre-Internet days.)
My favorite is the wealthy Singaporean who fell for it some years ago. After making several sizable transfers of money, he finally started getting suspicious. After telling them of his concerns, they invited him to Nigeria to see for himself that everything was aboveboard. He took them up on their offer, and as soon as he stepped off the plane, they kidnapped him and held him for ransom!
Whenever I hear about Nigerian scammers, I can’t help but remember this gem of a story.
They had other tricks before the Internet came along. I knew a wealthy Chinese-Thai businessman who was always getting snail-mail letters from Nigerian scammers back in the day. He said the thing was, the stamps on the letters were never canceled. The mailman seemed to be in cahoots with them, or at least someone in the postal service.
Well, he may be practicing law again in a little over a year.
His license is temporarily suspended until he complies with an audit and then that temporary suspension is lifted and a new suspension goes into place for another 12 months.
I got a few snail-mail Nigerian letters in the early 90s. I also got a few by fax.
Fuckin’ lost. 
This story is a special kind of stupid.
The scammer got duped enough to make a commercial for “Anus” laptops as well.
What I don’t get about that thread is that the scammer or at least an agent of the scammer apparently named Pirado James resides in the UK, an English speaking nation. Why then are the emails in not only broken English, but gibberish “deaded by the clique mob” and so on. And remember here this scammer is wanting to really threaten the guy, put a real scare into him. I’ve seen a theory before that the garbled English is a feature used to filter out all but the dumbest people, but he already snared this guy or so he thinks, why continue?
English is spoken in Nigeria, all Nollywood movies are filmed in English(albeit heavily accented) and people from Nigeria have assured me English is well known aside from rural hicks essentially.
I think I might frame this.
We’re all going to look like FOOLS when he gets that steamer-trunk frull of Benjamins, ya know.