I first wrote about the Nigerian Scam [1] back in July of 2001 on the ULRC site. It wasn’t by any means a new scam then, but the Internet was still rapidly expanding, and vast numbers of people were still making their way online for the first time, and were being exposed – at an alarming rate – to a scam the majority of them had never heard of before.

Almost six years later, and it appears that the Nigerian Scam is still going strong.

In a way, I’m a little surprised that so many people still fall for the Nigerian Scam. It’s received plenty of coverage both in the media and on the net, and a couple of minutes invested using a search engine for anyone wondering if the email might be legitimate would probably have saved a lot of people a lot of money.

That having been said, recent news from my very own home state of Queensland indicates that people still fall victim to this scam.

Aussies lose $7m to Nigerian scammers
Feb 02, 2006

AUSTRALIANS have lost more than $7 million in the notorious Nigerian investment scam – and police fear that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Queensland police fraud inspector Brian Hay said police had analyzed financial transactions to Nigeria for a two-month period and contacted about 60 per cent of the people involved.

Of those, 25 out of 26 were victims of the internet-based scam and only one had conducted legitimate business with Nigerian contacts.

“We were just completely blown away,” Insp Hay said.

“We’re talking about financial planners, accountants, people that perhaps should know better.”

Insp Hay said victims, who had received spam e-mails from the fraudsters, were sucked into the scheme by promises of up to $40 million for the temporary use of their bank accounts.

Source: news.com.au

If it’s surprising that people still fall for the Nigerian Scam, it’s utterly amazing that financial planners and accountants should number among them!

And yet, according to a US Secret Service advisory (see Further Reading below) in 2002, hundreds of millions of dollars are lost every year to Nigerian Scams and its variants.

Anatomy of a Scam

While the Nigerian Scam comes in many different forms and is now operated from many different countries, initial contact with potential victims usually follows a set pattern. To begin with, you receive an email that looks much like this:

The actual details of the email can vary considerably from the above, but generally they have the following things in common:

• The person contacting you needs access to a bank account or agent to secretly transfer a very large amount of money out of his or her country. Sometimes the money is said to have been discovered left lying idle in an account that no-one has accessed for years – perhaps due to the death of the person or persons who originally owned the account, perhaps because the money was set aside for a government or military contract that was never commissioned, etc – and at other times the money is described as requiring secret transfer because it will be used as part of a deal that a wealthy individual wishes to keep secret until completion
• The person contacting you needs what seems like simple assistance to transfer the money out of the country in question, so that it can be distributed amongst interested parties
• A significant amount of the total is being offered to you for providing that assistance
• Often a sense of urgency is communicated, with the email claiming that an audit is under way and if the money isn’t transferred quickly then access to it will be lost forever, etc

Once a potential victim has responded to this email – which is sent to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people at a time – a cat and mouse game begins in which the promise of the very large payout is held just out of arm’s reach as ‘complications’ arise that require the victim to ‘invest’ money to solve. Usually the amounts requested at the beginning are small, perhaps a few hundred dollars at most. But as the scam develops, the requests become larger and larger and simply don’t stop until the victim realizes he or she has been scammed, or literally has no more money they can beg, borrow or – all too often – steal to satisfy the ongoing demands.

Variations on a Theme

The canonical version of the Nigerian Scam has seen many changes and mutations over the years, with some being operated amateurishly, while others are slick enterprises willing to lease all the trappings of a legitimate business if the payout seems promising.

Some other versions of the scam are:

There are almost certainly many more versions and variations of the Nigerian Scam currently in operation, with still many more to come.

If you have received an interesting or new version of the scam, send it in via the submit an urban legend link, and I’ll share it with other readers of ulblog.

Further Reading

• Advance fee fraud
• More examples of Nigerian Scam emails
• US Secret Service advisory on the Nigerian Scam

Footnotes:

1.	Also known as an Advanced Fees Fraud and the 419 Scam, after the relevant section in the Nigerian criminal code that covers fraud operations such as these.
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