Ah, the famous Nigerian 419 scam, also known as Advance Fee Fraud.
That letter you received is the only part of a several-hundred
million dollar per year business that most people will see.
Yeah. Hundreds of millions of dollars per year -- and that's from people who will actually admit to falling for the scam.
Some estimates place 419 scamming as Nigerias fifth largest business.
As you can imagine, given an organized crime in which 99% of the contact takes place over the anonymity of the Internet and the criminals themselves rarely leave their countries
and the law enforcement in those countries actively engages in protecting the criminals -- recovering stolen money, or even prosecuting the criminals, is bloody near impossible.
Restoring my faith in libertarian philosophy, where governments can't get anything done, citizens have stepped up to the plate.
The tactic is called 'scambaiting'. People who know that the e-mail is a scam will reply to it, pretending to be gullible. Then they waste the time and money of the scammer by any means.
This is effective in a number of ways:
1) It takes time to scam someone. Every minute a scammer wastes trying to scam someone who knows better is a minute he can't use to scam Granma Frickert out of her savings;
2) It makes the scammers paranoid, so that when a legitimate mark acts a little odd, the scammer will decide that he's actually a baiter and drop him, and;
3) The humorous things done to the scammers by baiters are actually very good informational exercises: I can spend an hour telling people the facts about 419 scams and they'll forget all about it fifteen minutes after they leave the auditorium, or I can tell about the time I got a Nigerian 419 scammer to send me a picture of himself with an octopus on his head, and people will remember 419 scams for a damn sight longer then 15 minutes.
The best site I've found for information on scam-baiting is here:
www.419eater.comI'm registered on their forums as Templar. Drop by and take a look.
LawDog