OMG! I JUST RECEIVED a Nigerian email scam on my fax machine! So now I guess it’s the Nigerian fax scam. Well, actually, it came from South Africa, so I guess it would be the South African Fax Scam. Should I send them some money?
Seriously, Nigerian scams can be deadly! Advanced Fee Frauds, says that people have been assaulted and even murdered, after getting involved with “Nigerian 419 Advance Fee Fraud offenders”. The number 419 is the number of the article in the Nigerian Criminal Code that deals specifically with these scams.
As the site says, when you get an email from a Nigerian scam, it’s not just some solitary ding-dong sitting at his computer writing the email. They are organized gangs, using proven templates that are sent to thousands of email addresses. Some of them even have offices, legitimate fax numbers, and contacts in government office — so that when the target researches the offer, everything seems to check out.
Some of the victims have been held for ransom, assaulted, robbed, or killed when traveling to meet the scammers in their country.
Check out the Advanced Fraud Fees (site no longer available) site to see their database of hundreds of fraud letters, plus lots of little known information on Nigerian 419 Scams.
On a lighter note, author Steve Graham got fed up with getting annoying spam from crooks in Nigeria. He decided to waste their time the way they wasted his. He dragged dozens of email spammers into long drawn-out exchanges, posing as figures such as Barney Rubble, Herman Munster, Wile E. Coyote, and Adolf Hitler. And now the best exchanges have been condensed into this book, The Good, the Spam, and the Ugly