A five million dollars, all for allowing some super-rich Nigerian “transfer” his money elsewhere using your bank account – a deal of its kind isn’t it? The sad part is that 99% chances are that you would not even get a penny of that supposed five million, instead will end up losing tens of thousands in its pursuit.

There will be quite a few of us who get mails from unknown yahoo or hotmail IDs saying that the sender is a rich person from an impoverished country (mostly countries like Nigeria, Benin, Togo and the like) who needs to “discreetly” transfer funds out of his home country. For this, the person wishes to use our bank account and in return for our “generosity”, we’ll be rewarded with a hefty sum. Called advance fee frauds, such scams are confidence tricks in which potential victims are influenced to advance relatively small amounts of money to the scamsters in the hope of making a much larger gain.

Let’s have a look at a recent email a Singaporean university student received –

There will be cries of “Ah! It’s clearly bogus!” from most of us, but the unfortunate truth is that such scams are growing in their effectiveness and reach.

A Historical Take

The advance fee fraud is not a recent concept and is also not African in origin. It dates back to the late 16th century when various rich individuals received letters claiming to be from a wealthy person imprisoned in a Spanish castle. This “prisoner” would not have access to his huge wealth and would require money to bribe the guards. He would promise the recipient a huge amount of gold and his beautiful daughter as wife in return for this “help”.

The digital age version of the Spanish Prisoner con-trick is popularly called the Nigerian 419 scam. Named after the section of Nigerian law it violates, such email-scams started in the early 1990s when unemployed Nigerian youth made use of such measures to make money out of westerners lured by the cash up for grabs in Nigeria’s uncontrolled oil industry.

How does it work?

This scheme of schemes starts with an email. The sender would claim to represent a government agency which has been dissolved or some wealthy individual who has recently passed away. Such emails do not target businessmen alone, they are sent out to ordinary middle class householders as well as university students. Church officials are also sent uniquely worded requests talking about charitable donations.

Such mails have several unique attributes.
            They are generally marked “URGENT” and “CONFIDENTIAL”.
They contain spelling mistakes and grammatical errors which gives the reader a sense of intellectual superiority and sympathy towards the sender.
They talk about the trust that the sender has in the recipient’s honesty and other values.

If a recipient falls prey to the lure of the promised cash and replies to the email with his contact details, the scamsters begin phase two of their operation. The recipient will be mailed hundreds of “official” documents ranging from power of attorney forms to registration receipts. They would ask the recipient to provide his bank account details to them so that they could complete the “contract” and remit funds to him.

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