I continue to receive emails enticing me to resolve the modalities to fraudulently inherit some dead African guy’s estate. It continually amazes me that anyone on the internet doesn’t by now know about this scam and ignore the emails, but the fact that they continue to arrive must (I think) indicate that the scammers are still able to turn a profit this way.
Suppose we wanted to inform everyone on the internet about this scam - is there any practical way to do that? What would it take? Massive co-operation between all ISPs?
Or is that kind of penetration/distribution of message impossible? (and if so, is that a good thing?)
You are presuming that everyone would both read and believe your warning. This will not happen. Many will learn, but some will not. And email is so cheap that the scam will continue as long as even a tiny fraction of people will be suckered into it.
I don’t think most end-user spammers are writing their own spam and botnet software. They have to get it from somewhere. And I don’t think the developers of such software are doing it just for fun (they’re probably at least as greedy as the spammers). I know that if i had gone to the trouble to build a big botnet, I’d be charging a pretty penny for access to it. So there is almost surely payment happening somewhere, even when the delivery is happening through hijacked machines.
Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if the software was also widely pirated. If you’re ok with spamming millions of people for your own gain, surely you wouldn’t have a problem pirating software too…
Telling people about these scams is one thing, getting them to believe it is another. There have been many cases in the news of people getting suckered into 419 scams and everyone around them repeatedly tells them it’s a scam and they still continue paying into it. People have been visited by police and quite explicity told they are being taken and they still pay.
Plus the scams keep changing, even if you list the dead prince scam and the already won the national lottery scam, they will just invent new ones. A lot of people just won’t realize that it’s in the same category of what they have been warned about.
My mother is incredibly gullible and doesn’t understand the concept of con artists. I have never been able to convince her to stop paying money to obvious frauds, e.g., the lawn mower “repair” shop that rips her off at least once a year.
Yeah there was a thread here awhile back about a poster’s continued attempts to convince his elderly neighbor not to fall for an email scheme.
Yep, like the Russian “love” scam, in which a sweet and good looking Russian will email you back and forth over a period of time after meeting you on a social website, and after you have fallen in ‘love’ they convince you to send them money (or not even send any money, just open a bank account that their relative can transfer money into!) so they can emigrate to the US to be with you. I was impressed with the amount of effort that goes into those.
A lot of the people who fall into those scams are of limited faculties to begin with - mentally handicapped, early dementia, etc. Some are just Internet newbies who have no idea how things work.
I think the best warning and prevention system is to have ISPs and/or mail readers mark messages as potential scams. GMail does this already, and I’m sure it’s not alone.
Well, I am convinced in my heart that you think you just picked a name at random (as Mr. John Lennon also has claimed), but I assure you that Our High Functionary Prince Ob-Lladi Ob-Llad-ah (may his name be trumpeted above the skies) IS a real person, who is willing to reward anyone who helps him regain his throne but is not asking for any negotiable funds at this time from you, but merely wishes to hear that you are willing to listen to his story and decide for yourself indeed.
Yes I think that is the best explanation. I know an early Nigerian scam victim. This was so early, it was done by letter. The guy (who had a first class degree from either Oxford or Cambridge) eventually sent them in all $150,000, financed by a $100K mortgage on his house. Eventually, his wife had him declared incompetent and took over all the finances. Now he has been a long-time sufferer of MS. I was telling the whole story to my daughter-in-law, a physician and she told me that MS can cause deterioration of certain cognitive abilities, including, obviously from this case, judgment.
I wonder what is going to happen now. The wife is the final stages of terminal cancer, expected to die in less than a month. They have been living (since they lost their house to the mortgage company over ten years ago) in a small house near their daughter and I just hope she can take over.
I always find stories like Hari Seldon’s particularly sad. Has anyone ever tracked down any of these scammers in their county of origin and either attempted to bring them to justice or else administered their own form of…uh…street justice? I’ve never seen reports of that.
And while I realize most of Africa is pretty much the wild west and completely lawless, is Nigeria really one of those countries? I know they have rich oil fields and other natural resources of value. If I was a legitimate business in Nigeria, or one of these other countries, people would probably assume I was a scammer since that is all my country is known for. Wouldn’t I be putting some pressure on my government to fix that problem so my legitimate business can get international customers, which ultimately helps them in the form of taxes, etc.? Plus, I would think these countries would have an incentive to stop the dirtbag scammer if for no other reason than to seize their property, which was used in the commission of a crime.
There is nothing that can be done to dissuade people who actually believe that a Nigerian prince needs a total stranger’s help to get their money out of the country.
There is only one real option – to keep these emails out of their hands. I think dracoi’s solution is the best. Spam filters need to be improved
Also, INTERPOL or some other international police force need to go after the spammers directly and agressively. There probably needs to be some kind of international treaty on spamming, that defines it and gives gives the police agency authority to go wherever needed.
Even if we fixed greed among all the potential marks, the scammers would just move on to scams that take advantage of generosity, like fake charities. The greed of others is useful to scammers but not essential.
