KEROBOKAN, Bali ~ Recently I wrote about phishing emails, the devious way people try to capture your personal account information. Now I want to share my thoughts on another swindle, the “Nigerian scam.”
A sister crime of phishing, it’s been around a lot longer. It started back in 1980 as postal mail, but as the world wired up, it moved to email (also via phones and fax). It is also known as 419 Scam, referring to the Nigerian crime code for fraud.
Since 2000, the Internet Fraud Center, run by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center, has lodged around 600 complaints about the Nigerian scam. Only two, however, turned out to have successful in cheating people out of their money. Both cases were worth US$31,000.
Many of you will undoubtedly have received these emails, usually from Nigeria but also from other African nations. The sender claims there’s a huge sum of money in their country and they need YOUR help to gain access to it, commonly by transfer to your account and then on to the recipient.
What’s in it for you? Something like half of the cash can be yours, just by helping out with your own personal account. Tempting? Maybe. Maybe, definitely, not.
Of course, if you reply to the bogus missives, you’ll swiftly receive official-looking documents seeking your bank-account details – and cash to cover transaction and attorney’s fees. Sometimes you’ll even be asked to travel to Nigeria or a bordering country in order to conclude the business. And on and on until the money has been transferred and the crook scarpers, leaving you high and dry and feeling a bit asinine for having been so easily conned.
According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States, here’s what you should do if you find yourself ensnared by such mails:
If you're tempted to respond to an offer, the FTC suggests you stop and ask yourself two important questions: Why would a perfect stranger pick you - also a perfect stranger - to share a fortune with, and why would you share your personal or business information, including your bank account numbers or your company letterhead, with someone you don't know? And the U.S. Department of State cautions against traveling to the destination mentioned in the letters. According to State Department reports, people who have responded to these "advance-fee" solicitations have been beaten, subjected to threats and extortion, and in some cases, murdered.
If you receive an offer via email from someone claiming to need your help getting money out of Nigeria - or any other country, for that matter - forward it to the FTC at spam@uce.gov.
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