In the year of our Lord that is 2010, who the bleeding hell still falls for the emails of Nigerian scammers? Plenty of folk. But who are these mystery folk who try to trick the world out of several thousand quid a pop? Scam Detectives recently published a three part interview with a convicted advance fee fraud scammer. It’s worth reading all three interviews with ‘John’, but here are some highlights:

I come from a poor family in Lagos, Nigeria. We did not have very much money and good jobs are hard to find. I was approached to work for a gang master when I was 15, because I had done well in school with my English, and was getting to be good with computers. The gang master was offering good money and I took the chance to help my family. There is a lot of corruption in Nigeria and the gangs pay [teachers] well to find people with good English skills to work the scams.

At the bottom [of the scamming gangs] are the “foot soldiers”, kids who spend all of their time online to find email addresses and send out the first emails to get people interested. When they receive a reply, the victim is passed up the chain, to someone who has better English to get copies of ID from them like copies of their passport and driving licenses and build up trust. Then when they are ready to ask for money, they are passed further up again to someone who will pretend to be a barrister or shipping agent who will tell the victim that they need to pay charges or even a bribe to get the big cash amount out of the country. When they pay up, the gang master will collect the money from the Western Union office, using fake ID that they have taken from other scam victims.

Maybe 9 or 10 out of every thousand emails get a response. Then maybe 1 out of every 20 replies would lead to us getting money out of the victim in the end. expect to get from a victim? On average, I expected to get about $7,500 (£4,600) from a victim but the most I know about was $25,000 (£15,400). (more…)

If we were to ask you which country was the source of most online scams, it’d be reasonable to assume Nigeria would make the top two answers and not finish second. We’ve all received countless pleas for assistance from the families of Nigeria’s disproportionate number of diplomats, executive bankers, missionaries and politicians – all of whom almost, but not quite, have access to eight figure sums of cash. Like the inevitability of jamming a kitchen drawer because the potato masher is the wrong way round, Nigerian scammers are a universal truth, surely?

As long as you don’t say it out loud, that’s fine. Unlike Sony, who decided to promote the new price point of the PS3 with a big ol’ round of advertising, which included a line suggesting Nigeria is rammed to the brim with fraudsters:

The Nigerian Federal Government has now asked Sony to withdraw all advertising and offer an unreserved apology. According to their statement:

“Nigeria demands an unconditional apology from Sony Corporation for this deliberate negative campaign against the country’s image and reputation. The apology must be given the same measure of publicity by Sony Corporation in all channels where the unfortunate adverts were aired.”

So Nigeria are expecting Sony to pay for a second advertising campaign on the same scale, that claims nobody in Nigeria is involved in shilling the population of the planet? That’d be a scam in itself, wouldn’t it? And in case you didn’t find the advert all that entertaining to begin with, here’s the return of Joss Whedon’s Doctor Horrible and Captain Hammer at last night’s Emmys in the US.

God be with you on this glorious day.

[Vanguard.com] via [Consumerist]

Time for an ethical question. If a company with a UK presence had been involved in the execution of environmental activists, would it make you think twice about using their products?

Personally, this writer would say hell yes, but at the end of the day it’s down to yourself and your conscience. Of course it’s a hypothetical question and nothing to do with the fact that Royal Dutch Shell have agreed to pay out almost £10 million following a lawsuit over the 1995 hangings of six oil exploration protestors in Nigeria. Crucially, Shell acknowledged no wrongdoing. AND NO ONE IS SAYING THEY WERE INVOLVED. RIGHT?

In the lawsuit, heard in New York, Shell were accused of colluding with the country’s former military government to silence activists in the country and helped furnish Nigerian police with weapons, participated in security sweeps of the area, and hired troops that shot at villagers protesting over the construction of a pipeline. THEY DENIED BEING INVOLVED IN ALL OF THIS. RIGHT?

Shell hope that the pay-out will help the “process of reconciliation” and their executive director of exploration and production, Malcolm Brinded, said: “This gesture also acknowledges that even though Shell had no part in the violence that took place, the plaintiffs and others have suffered.” SHELL HAD NO INVOLVEMENT IN THE VIOLENCE. OKAY?

But, and this is still HYPOTHETICAL, what if another company had been behind the hangings of a group of activists, say for example, Kelloggs? Would that stop you from buying Ricicles? And will the Shell story influence you to buy your fuel elsewhere? Your hypothetical comments on this hypothetical situation are welcome. And remember, you are legally responsible for the contents of your posts.

So when it recently came to light that spammers have to send over 12 million emails to find one gullible fool who’ll sign up to whatever they’re selling, the question that came to mind was “who was that idiot, then?”. Step forward registered nurse Jenella Spears of Sweet Home, Oregon who was duped to the tune of over $400,000.

How the blithering hell do find yourself emptying your husband’s retirement account and re-mortgaging the house for the sake of a spammer? All it took was the name of Spears’ grandfather to start the ball rolling. An email arrived from the Nigerien government (where else?), promising to cough up $20 million left behind by grandpops J.B. Spears, with whom the family had lost contact over the years. (more…)

Dearest,

I write to you with sadness in my heart and tears in my eyes.

I have just read that Nigerian fraudsters have learned how to crack Facebook’s security using high-end viruses and the like. They are sending messages posing as friends who are stranded abroad who need money wiring to buy a ticket home.

The trend of criminals moving into social media is because the traditional email scams – including those involving my late father, the former secretary to the Nigerian State Treasury – are becoming ineffective.

Unlike emails, these fake messages are written in good English although are given away by the use of foreign phrasing such as “cell phone” and similar.

I am contacting you so you are aware of these scams, as I fell for one and lost all my life savings. I now have no way to feed the many children in my orphanage. They are hungry and continue to cry through the night. Please you could spare $500 so I can bring a smile of joy to their sad faces.

Peace be with you,

Reverend Jacob Ashley

[Telegraph]

I once sold a laptop on eBay. Got a reasonable bid, but was then offered a very sweet price from a respectable gentleman in Nigeria who wanted the computer for his son. I needed the money and couldn’t believe my luck. I almost sent it too, but the deal fell apart when I started looking into the money order receipt. It didn’t seem to exist.

I was very nearly another sucker, courtesy of our friends on the African continent. That was half a decade ago; nobody falls for that scam now, do they? Surely there can’t be a Nigerian man, woman or child who hasn’t worn a fish on their head?

But organised crime in Africa is still raking in the goods from the gullible, according to ITV’s Tonight programme, because they’ve adapted their techniques. Instead of trying to swindle a victim directly, they’re now using ‘mules’; innocent parties who unknowingly handle the stolen goods on their behalf.

The mules are recruited through fake job adverts, websites and dating sites. The victims are befriended, and are soon handling high value parcels that they send on to addresses in the likes of Nigeria and Ghana. Passing the goods through the mule creates a longer paper trail while minimising the risk of exposure; fewer sellers are going to twig that there’s a problem if the mailing address is in the UK. The contents of the parcels have usually been bought online using stolen credit card details, before being delivered to the third party mule.

So all in all, instead of preying on just one individual – the eBay seller or the like – there are now three victims – the owner of the stolen credit card information, the seller and the mule. While it seems unbelievable that people are still vulnerable to this type of fraud, plenty of folks are still new to the wonders of the online world; you don’t get a crash course in scams when you buy your first broadband package.

[The Register]

You’ve got to be pretty thick to fall for a Nigerian 419 scam email. But the needle has got to be twitching away in the red part of the Thickter Scale if you start nicking from your employer in order to fund the scamsters.

In short, you’d have to be 53-year old American lady Jalaine Noella Holtan. But the thing is, she didn’t steal the money, she only ‘borrowed’ it, against the $10 million she was certain she’d be getting once her ‘investments’ in Nigerian ‘diamonds’ and ‘oil’ had matured.

Inevitably, poor Jalaine got nabbed and she’s due in court next month. The whereabouts of her $10 million windfall are still unknown, although you’ll probably get an email soon offering it to you.