Gizoogle has this to say about the OP:
Why would you want to stop it. Currently, they are taking all their names and once they get enough to fill a supertanker they’ll ship 'em off to Nigeria*. The Pareto Principle states that 20% of the idiots account for 80% of the news coverage, so we should see a net increase in the level of intelligence on the continent by eliminating the worst offenders.
Unfortunately, idiocy abhors a vacuum, and as idiots breed like flies (worse yet, the idiot gene is probably dominant given the 3 out of 4 chance of any two parents giving birth to an idiot), it is likely that this will be a temporary solution. It will be no time at all until we are up to our eyeballs in idiots again. 
*We can only hope!
There’s also the “Black money scam” .
I would like to think that it is just idiots who get taken. The NCO that I worked for, while deployed, told me about his mother who had to find a stay-at-home job (she has health issues and takes care of a mentally challeged daughter). She found a job on the internet that could fill her requirements and pay well. The job was to assist people in buying and selling things online. An overpayment by check would be made with the employee keeping the difference. I showed my NCO this link on Snopes warning about this. The only difference was that the employer was in Russia instead of Africa. He replied that Cashiers checks are safe and that I was trying to keep his mom from getting a job that could support her.
I asked him about this later and he became upset and said something about how she didn’t like the job.
Now, I know how some people feel about the intellegence of Soldiers, but in my job you have to be somewhat bright or you can’t qualify for the job. Some people just don’t see until they have been taken.
Sgt Schwartz
Work-at-home “mules” are indeed acquired by a diverse spectrum of scams. Cases range from mules being payed to receive packages and then just turn around and re-ship them to an overseas address (to get around the policies of businesses who will not ship electronics or other easily liquidatable merchandise overseas), sometimes it is re-sending miscelaneous “mail” (some of which contain credit cards that have been fraudulently acquired using the mule’s address as the billing address on the account). These cases are particularly nasty because the mules often also become victims of some level of identity theft, and then there’s the small matter of the mule’s home address being known by agents of the Russian Mob or whathaveyou.
The most recent wave are the payment processing mules. This blog has some decent information and links to stories about fraudsters not only targeting the work-at-home crowd, but also targeting kids as mules. It also links to a story of a Better Business Bureau employee who ended up working for such a scam to make a little extra money, even after apparently doing some degree of due dilligence to make sure everything was good and proper.
Did you tell him…?
People also forget that in the year of our Lord Two Thousands and Seven, there are STILL large numbers of internet newbies, many of them children or elderly. Just because fellow Dopers know about the Nigerian scams to the point of folklore doesn’t mean Joe Average who has just bought his first PC does.
As a pre-internet example, I can remember being about eleven and going out front to get the mail. There was a letter from Reader’s Digest: YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED FOR A $1000000 DRAW!! YOU HAVE ALREADY PASSED THROUGH FOUR OF THE FIVE PRELIMINARY STAGES!! Or something. I was very excited until my dad came home and promptly threw it in the bin. Then I realised it was crap.
My son comes over on access visits, and because he has no computer at his house (but is computer literate) the first thing he does is hit my machine to play games and look at American wrestling sites. These sites are absolutely full of dodgy spyware and stuff. I have to watch him because he will see something like “CLICK ON THIS BIG RED BUTTON FOR FREE STUFF!” and get excited. He can’t see the danger. Same with my dad - he’s 78 and has a computer. I will get phone calls saying “I’m getting a message that my computer has a very dangerous virus and I need to click on this thing…” “NOOOOO DAD, DON’T DO IT!!!”
The Nigerian scam is admittedly a step beyond as there is a basic “too-good-to-be-true” alarm that will go off in people’s minds, but that isn’t infallible, and intelligent people can and do fall for this stuff. Even if it’s only one in a million it’s worth it - the basic rule of spam.
Hunt down the perpetrators and torture them to death on television?
Might or might not work, but I doubt anything less would deter copycats.
If the only source of my information about the various Nigerian Bank fraud schemes were from the internet I’d be more willing to accept your reasoning. As it is, I’ve seen articles on the dangers of the fraud in such venues as the daily papers, The New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, and several different ‘specials’ on news or current events channels.
Though I do have to back up and admit that I should have excepted children from my ire. I still stand by my amended assertion that in this day and age any adult not approaching senility should know better.
But think of the opportunities!
I followed the link in ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies’s message 25, and started following the links from there, and ran into the statistic in Fraud, Phishing, and Financial Misdeeds that
Holy shit! I’m impressed! I wonder if the statistic is similar in the other direction?
Wait, that’s a scam?
Aww… Crap.
One thing working in a bank has helped me to do is keep a few people from falling for these scams.
Examples:
You just won the Australian lottery and only need to send us $1000 for processing so we can send you your check.
We are excited to have you working for us as a secret shopper. All you need to do is deposit this check for $5000 into you checking account and send us back a check for $2500 and we can send you assignments.(You send off the check and the one you deposited bounces, which means you are screwed).
There are many examples but those are the most common. Customers I’ve worked with for years drop in with these and ask me if they are scams. We have a few customers who have sent very large sums of money trying to collect on these scams. We advise them and it doesn’t matter. People in their 60’s and older who want to be hard headed. Rather sad because they will not have a chance to rebuild their wealth.
I got a really good laugh out of this. Especially the part about the Israeli Carp Fishing Association. Wow.
I recall reading an article in the New Yorker about a respected psychiatrist and decorated military veteran in his 60s being tricked by one of these scams and pouring every cent into it. When he failed to recieve his money, he wrote desperate, pleading emails to the scammers - still not realizing it was a scam.
How could someone be so out of the loop?
Gad, if only I’d read this thread last week.
To be fair, the Reader’s Digest do pay out these prizes.
They fund it by using inertia selling (you are also invited to accept a cheap gift, which is the first part of a series (usually a book). Unless you cancel, you have to pay for future issues. They also build up a mailing list of people interested in offers.
https://myrd.readersdigest.co.uk/myrd/winners.nsf/webtowns?OpenView&Start=1&Count=1000&Expand=1#1
Early in my engineering career I worked with a contract engineer in his late 70’s. He claimed he couldn’t retire because he had lost all of his savings pursuing “get rich quick schemes.” which I assume to have been pre-Internet frauds…didn’t press for details, as he was somewhat embarrassed about it. Essentially, he felt his only remaining option was to keep working until he dropped. I often wonder what finally happened to him.
I have an ex-girlfriend who fell for a pyramid scheme (a few years before I met her). And sadly, she convinced a good friend of hers to “invest” as well. They both lost about $500.
She was pretty bright and in a normal business context you couldn’t ever scam her (she had to deal with contracts daily and always haunted for the scuzzy clauses under the assumption the contract was designed to rip someone off). But once in awhile, she could be really naive.
There’s a lot of pyramid-esque stuff going on in the Incentive Marketing/Affiliate Marketing arena, but they feed off of the advertising and customer aquisition costs of the companies that choose that particular route to market their products and services, so I shed no tears for them.