Another African Royal Needs My Help

I don't know about you, but I probably get 10 or 15 spam email scams a week from some guy with an unpronounceable name who needs my help to transfer millions of dollars. After all these years, I can't believe there are still people that fall for that nonsense, but according to this article, the Nigerian scam business is alive and well:

In a steamy Lagos Internet café, thumping with the bass beat of Nigerian rock videos on a TV overhead, barrister Olayinka Okwudili sits writing an urgent e-mail about his financial crisis.

If you believe the letter, he's a prominent Lagos barrister who needs to move some money. It is possible, however, that this young man in artfully distressed jeans and a T-shirt is not, in fact, a barrister, but he is distinctly unwilling to discuss the matter.

Similar young men, alone or in pairs, are at many of the computers around him in a middle-class residential neighbourhood of Africa's busiest city, some of whom can be overheard discussing the exact turn of phrase they need for their letters, which seek "dear friends" in "far off lands" to help them with the "very urgent matter of $10-million" tragically left in the account of their "very dear late father."

You know the letters, of course. If you have an e-mail account, you have received one from an apologetic correspondent (likely to be either the child of a recently deposed African leader or a recently dismissed middle manager in a government ministry) who acknowledges he or she does not know you personally but nevertheless seeks your assistance with a financial transaction.

For your help, they say, you will receive a multimillion-dollar thank-you present.

There's another variation on these scams that have been designed to appeal to the tender hearts of Christians, who must be as greedy as everybody else based on the number of these things that I get. They wouldn't be sending them out if they weren't getting responses.

Nigerian scams aren't a recent invention thanks to email, either. Back in my banking days, we had several attempts, and maybe even one successful attempt, to con either a gullible bank employee or a customer into wiring money to the con men in return for some type of huge award. I remember having a salesmen come to me all excited about a $30 million dollar wire he was going to get, and he was already counting the commission. I had to burst his balloon.

Despite the silly nature of these emails, they do find willing victims often enought to keep the scams going:

The letters are so frequent and so preposterous that you may find it difficult to believe that anyone replies, let alone forks over bank details or cash.

But they do: People involved in the scam -- known as 419 after the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code that prohibits it -- say that they get one or two genuine replies for every thousand letters they send. And of those handful of replies, every month or so, one yields a few thousand dollars, and one yields substantially more.

Their favourite targets are Americans, who have the perfect combination of greed and gullibility. "The Americans always go for it," according to a senior member of one 419 ring, who gave his name as Sunny. "But Canadians never do it. It's difficult to hook a person from Canada."

No one here seems to know exactly how much money changes hands in 419 fraud, very little of which is reported. But last month, two men were convicted of fraud after a gullible and corrupt bank employee in Brazil was convinced to send so much money -- $242-million to help win a fake airport contract -- that the bank from which he was embezzling actually collapsed.

Oh well, gotta go now and get that wire transfer to Nigeria ready. I'll soon be rich thanks to my kind heart and willingness to assist a rich African who needs my help.