I got my first such by regular mail, it was a photocopy, in 1994… about three weeks before I was scheduled to fly to Nigeria on business. It scared the shit out of me, because I’d not seen one before: it was obviously a scam, but I thought they had targeted me because I was going there. Luckily others at my firm (who hadn’t ever travelled outside the US) had seen it before and reassured me.
Nigeria always wins the prize for “most corrupt” country in the world. They even have a word for bribery: “dash.” It is certainly reasonable that a Nigerian official would have lots of money that he wanted to get out of the country but couldn’t do through legit channels. Hence, the scam has some sort of credibility, in a way that it wouldn’t if it were an official in Sweden, say, or Canada.
I can only read so much of the scambaiting stories before I stop, because the scammers are so stupid and their stories are so convoluted, over-elaborate, and have so little effort put into them that it stops being funny and starts being monotonous. It’s like opening secret Scientology scriptures for the first time, imagining you’ll find some deep dark elaborate evil theology, and finding something that reads like a mixture of bad science fiction and a parody of modern business jargon. I generally can’t be bothered to put any more skill and effort into reading something than its author put into writing it. The Nigerians are insultingly lazy in their composition; often they can’t bother to use the same made up name in the first line as in the signature line.
After receiving a cheque for (massive-over) payment for two pedigree kittens my wife advertised for sale we then got an email asking for the balance to sent back and, here’s the best bit, politely asking that we ensure the ‘car’ was cleaned out and the keys ready for collection!
I got my first Nigerian scam (hardcopy) letter back in '95 when I worked for an import company. I had never heard of 419 scams before, but how hard is it to realize someone smart enough to steal 49 MILLION US DOLLARS, WE WILL GIVE YOU ONE THIRD, 16 MILLION AND 333 THOUSAND DOLLARS but can’t figure a better way to launder the ill-gotten loot than random strangers?
I suspect that normally even reasonably corrupt countries make some effort to keep scammers in check. An Economist article on 419 scams (from a dozen years ago, or so) placed a lot of blame on their government.
I met a Nigerian guy in London who said that the scams were mostly perpetrated by one of the several tribes that make up the Nigerian populace who, according to him, had a long history of trickery and scamming as an accepted part of their culture. The way he described it, in this tribe it was accepted that if someone was smart enough to trick you out of something, you accepted that as being your fault, and laughed it off.
He freely admitted that he was a member of the tribe in question.
Which of course leads to something of a paradox, in terms of whether I should have believed him or not.
A human can do it with a very high degree of accuracy - just look for the telltale Something for Nothing. Shouldn’t be massively difficult for software to do this as well.
As a professional software programmer in a different industry, I can only say this: it is precisely those things that humans find easy that is so incredibly difficult to get computers to get right.
I am with Huerta88 on this. I find it incredible that anyone with half a brain can believe their crap. Same as I don’t beleive gorgeous Russian women want to marry me, or that those “enlargement” spam emails contain any thing useful.
It’s like fishing. Any individual fish is slippery and almost impossible to catch, but cast a wide net and you still catch fish.
As long as there are some people out there who have never heard of the scam, then mass emailing will snag them, and a few of them will be too dumb, greedy or hopeful to see through it.
There was a bit on the news a year or so ago about a guy who was taken in on a Nigerian scam. IIRC he lost about $200K. The kicker: he was a doctor. The kicker-in-the-ass: he went on TV and was complaining about it.
I mean, come ON: he’s obviously educated. But he’s willing to go on TV and show the world how stupid/greedy he is? How many patients did he have after that?
Isn’t there some old con axiom that says the scam effect is directly proportional to the pigeon’s greed?
The people who fall for scams are probably those who also respond to junk mail, spam, and all that. The likelihood of success from a scammer’s POV is small, but multiplied by a zillion emails, they suck some people in. The rewards are great enough in those few cases to justify continuing it.
From a previous life (as in employment) I know there were lots of doctors who used accountants and such to handle their financial affairs- they weren’t very good at it. That is not tosay they weren’t fine doctors- just a different bent I guess.
And I do not wish to insult any of the medical profession here.
Clearly, here is one who should have consulted an accountant (or investment analyst) first. I think it point out how you can be really smart in one way and really not in another…but that’s why sometimes otherwise intelligent people fall for it. Greed is just one of the seven deadly sins, any of which can probably circumvent intelligence.
They even have a website. http://www.nigerianmafia.com. You have to give them an email address to enter the site but in an ironic twist, a fake address will work just fine.
India is the world center of manual black hat SEO: guestbook, forum and blog spamming. The Russians and Ukrainians have bots, but those can be easily blocked through tough captchas and email blacklists. Indians do it by hand. One pf several variants: the “tell me more” post.
[Indian SEO]
I am finding this to be most informative. You will kindly do the needful and send me more information on this subject very much please.
But what are the rewards? How much do you think these scammers are making? Maybe it’s all from Nigeria because you have to be piss-poor for the economics to make sense.
The article I cited above say they can get very wealthy by doing it in volume.
See also:
I think the answer is that they start out small, and then work their way up for more and more as long as the victim is willing to play ball. From reading the stories on 419eater, I would speculate that the initial request is for a few hundred dollars (which could indeed represent a fair amount in Lagos), but that they’d be happy to ratchet the incremental “newly discovered transfer fees” up into the tens of thousands or even higher if the victim kept paying. On the one hand, those are pretty small sums if the victim really is going to get seven million dollars. On the other hand, there is no seven million dollars, so the answer to when will they stop extracting money is, when the victim wises up and stops paying it.
