Several years ago, I got a particularly amusing scam email. It was from a gentleman in Nigeria, asking me to briefly hold a few million dollars for him. He said that he couldn’t access the money directly because of a very complicated situation at an embassy, but that I could get it for him in the United States with ease. For my trouble, the writer would happily part with a few hundred thousand dollars. At first, I was struck by the creativity of the email. This was no misspelled advertisement for fake pharmaceuticals or stolen Rolexes. The embassy situation was elaborate and the whole thing had the feeling of a spy novel. However, no one would trust a random college student with millions of dollars, and it would be absolutely absurd to setup such a transaction by email.
The novelty of the scam wore off by the third of these emails. By the tenth, I decided that there was an obvious pattern — the writers were all in similarly sticky situations, and almost all claimed to be from the same country — so I searched for common email scams. I discovered that this scam is called a “419 scam” (after the section of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with them) and that the U.S. Secret Service was interested in cracking down on them. Additionally, it turns out that the emails that I was receiving were part of a larger trend, called “advance fee fraud,” and that the scam far predates computers. There are many variations on the theme, too. For example, instead of a foreign civil servant in trouble with the law, sometimes a scammer will buy something from you over the web (say, your old bookshelves that you listed on craigslist), then send you a money order for more than your price, asking you to send back the difference. Of course, the money order is fake, so if you do send a check for the “difference” between your asking price and the amount paid, you’re out all of the money. The variations are endless, but the theme is the same.
By now, I have received thousands emails that offer me great riches—but really promise to dupe me out of a lot of time and money. I have grown to disdain them, as I do most scammers. As my officemate said when I told him about this blog entry, “Everybody who has seen one of those emails hates those guys.” So, I was elated this morning to see Ars Technica report that “[a]uthorities in several countries have cracked down on Nigerian e-mail scammers, resulting in the seizure of over $2.1 billion in fraudulent checks. The National Consumers League, in conjunction with the US Postal Inspection Service, announced yesterday that 77 arrests have been made in connection with the scams.” This means a few less scammers in the world, and a greater risk for the existing ones. Equally exciting is the National Consumers League’s launch at the time of these arrests of a new website, FakeChecks.org, which is aimed at preventing this kind of fraud. The site has good testimonials and information about the scams, and also prevention information. Be sure to share it with your community and avoid any fishy offers of instant wealth that come by email!
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