The son of a close friend of mine has been had by a Nigerian scammer. Details are a bit sketchy but it goes something like this:
Naive young man chats with young girl on the internet. Photos are exchanged. She’s in Nigeria (this should have been his first clue but at this point I think the little head was doing the thinking). She wants to come to the US but doesn’t have the money. But, she does have this cashier’s check drawn on a US bank but no way to cash it. (I don’t know the details of this part or what her excuse was that she couldn’t cash the check) At this point I should say that not only is the young man in question naive, he’s not especially bright and someone who’s easily fooled or conned.
She offers Naive Young Man $500 to cash the check for her and wire her the money. The check is in the amount of $4500. NYM recieved said check Federal Express (of course he didn’t save the envelope with the return address). A cashier’s check drawn on a US bank (he couldn’t remember where but out of state) He deposits said check and asks how soon the money will be available. The bank says that the funds will be available in 12 hours. Next day he goes to Western Union and wires $4000 to his little girlfriend to be in Nigeria.
One week later the bank calls and says hey, that $4500 check you deposited bounced and we’d like to have our $4500 back please. NYM goes into the bank and explains the situation. Bank is unsympathetic. He deposited a bad check and spent the money. They want their money back.
Meanwhile, a couple of days after he wired the 4000 would be girlfriend in Nigeria says that she got robbed on the way home from the Western Union office and can he send more money. (which I thought took some balls but they thought they had them a live one). Before he could wire any more to them the check bounced and NYM realized that he’d been had. This is when he went to good old dad (my friend) to bail him out.
NYM has been soundly reprimanded by his father and pretty well humiliated as the story has gotten out among his peers and his dad’s friends.
I don’t know how the story ends but his dad was going to go to the bank and try to reason with them. I’ve urged him to report it to some athority and I think they’re going to do that though he’s never going to see that $4500 again.
I don’t know what sort of “reasoning” the dad has planned with the bank. It wouldn’t be “reasonable” for them to accept any of the loss for the NYM’s incredibly stupid actions.
Not that it will likely make any difference, but Fed Ex should be able to retrieve and provide this information. They’ll know they delivered an envelope to a certain address/person on a certain day and all other particulars follow from that.
That’s true. I don’t know what they’re doing in the way of reporting this to authorities or whatever but I imagine that might be useful information.
Fiver Dad’s fairly wealthy and may be able to use the size of his bank account to persuade the bank to let his son make payments. Maybe not. More than likely Dad will pay the bank and his son will pay him back.
One of my friends got bit by the Nigerian scam; she and her husband were out $5000.
What really pissed me off is that after I found out, I sent them links out the wazoo, to here, Snopes, and several fraud site- government and private- and they never did shit about it.
A month or so ago my Mom soberly discussed this disturbing e-mail she’d received, wanting to know my professional opinion about it.
Me: This is seriously the first time you’ve seen one of these, Mom?
Mom: Yes. I just thought it was so strange that the diplomat who died in the mysterios car crash had our last name…
Once I had Mom straightened out about the topic, she became a bit of an obsessed hobbyist about it, at least for a couple of weeks. She called me last week and said that she’d heard that someone actually cashed in on a Nigerian Scam, but only because of a bank error. I haven’t been able to find a cite, but I’ll see if she still has anything on it.
Baiting them at least seems like a it could be a fun thing to do on those annoying insomnia nights.
Interesting story. I’ve always wondered how those Nigerian scams work. The Naive Yong Man was indeed a NYM! Wow he should’ve got a clue in the first instance. Everything from the start didn’t sound good, sadly he carried on to the bitter end.
Part of me really wants to give the NYM a scolding, but then again there’s so many NYM internet users. There must be several people that don’t even know about Nigerias standing, and feel the need to “help!”
Paypal and western union are always mentioned in scams ebay or otherwise.
I got my first “Long, lost cousin” email the other day. Imagine my surprise that my long, lost cousin Marc [Magill] was not only a world famous diplomat, but also fabulously wealthy.
I suppose if geneology weren’t a hobby of mine, and I’ve been hit repeatedly with a baseball bat, I might have fallen for it.
This thread title gave me the mental image of hordes of Nigerians carrying around picket signs demanding sound cards and faster processors before returning to their computers to send more spam.
I heard on the news about a similar scam, only with a used car purchase. It went something like:
Buyer contacts seller of car (maybe an on-line seller or somesuch) and says they want to buy a car that costs $5,000, but all they have is a cashiers check for $9,000 and they can’t cash it for some weird reason. If the seller will cash the check and send back the change, they can keep $700 for themselves- just send back the difference.
Same deal- seller sends back money, bank bounces check, all goes bad.