June 10 2006

The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Page EE6.

Nigerian scams grow on Internet
By Don Oldenburg


Who falls for this stuff?

Who's so greedy or naive to get suckered by those Nigerian scams that litter in-boxes and spam filters with rubbish so clearly a ruse you'd have to be a knucklehead or on drugs not to just delete them?

That's the question people ask. Readers raise it all the time. Whenever the column or talk turns to swindles and the Nigerian e-mail nonsense in particular, they want to know: Who could possibly fall for this?

You might be surprised.

Sami Klein received an e-mail a few months ago from someone named "Susan Bryant," purportedly an art dealer in London who needed a representative in the United States to "facilitate money exchanges" with her U.S. customers. Something about Americans who buy her artwork always paying with money orders that are difficult to cash in London.

Thinking it was legit, and maybe an interesting opportunity, Klein replied with her name and address as requested.

"I didn't worry about sending it to her," says Klein, 66, a retired science librarian from Columbia, Md., who knows better than to give out her Social Security number, credit card and banking information to strangers but figured sending her name and address wouldn't hurt.

A week later, Klein received an envelope containing five Wal-Mart money orders made out to her, each for $925. As instructed, she cashed the money at her bank, kept 10 percent and wired the remainder via Western Union to "Bryant's" husband, who just happened to be in Nigeria collecting wood for artwork.

"I never knew that money orders could be recalled, but that is what happened," says Klein, whose bank deducted the $4,000 she wired to Nigeria from her own funds. Never mind the $462 commission she thought she earned --- that was as bogus as the counterfeit Wal-Mart money orders.

But that didn't end the scam. Even as Klein was making out the police report and putting her bank on notice, she was still receiving e-mails from Bryant prepping her for more transactions. She messaged back that she wanted the $4,000 restored to her account and wasn't doing any more work until it was.

Bryant sent an apologizing e-mail to Klein, filled with lousy grammar and misspellings, blaming the "delay" on the U.S. customer. She promised to wire 20 percent commissions directly to a Wells Fargo bank account for Klein's future help. Oh, and she said she'd happily instruct Klein how to open that account.

Klein declined. "I could be a sucker once, but I'm not stupid," she says. "Lesson learned."

Klein doesn't qualify as a greedy or naive person. Other than being retired, she's not standard scam-victim material. She has traveled the globe and lived in Japan, Italy and Malta. Since retiring, she has stayed active --- she gardens, reads extensively, does computer database work, knits hats for cancer patients and even serves as president of her temple. If she could fall for it, so could lots of people. And they do.

Last March, it was Louis A. Gottschalk, the respected founding chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of California at Irvine. He wired $3 million to Nigeria. In April, there was an Idaho financial planner. Last year, a Los Angeles record producer. How about the Massachusetts psychotherapist profiled recently in the New Yorker?

"There are some highly educated people who for whatever reasons fall victim to this," says Tom Mazur, spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service, which investigates such scams. "I don't know their motivation for getting pulled into one of these schemes. Certainly these types of criminals prey on the emotions and on people's sympathies sometimes. But somewhere in the back of their minds, the victim's got to be thinking about getting rich quick."

Nigerian fraud scams (aka "419 scams" after the Nigerian penal code addressing fraud) have been around since the '70s, when money was swindled the old-fashioned way --- con artists had to lick stamps and send letters. The Internet changed all that, making it easy to spam millions of potential victims with classic 419 scam e-mails, purportedly from the daughter of a deposed African dictator or a former finance minister of an African nation who seeks your help in transferring millions of dollars to the United States --- and promises a tasty percentage for your help!

Too absurd to work? Ultrascan Advanced Global Investigations, a Dutch private investigation firm that has been studying 419 scams worldwide for a decade, released its latest damage estimates in March. Companies and individuals in the United States were scammed for $720 million in losses in 2005, it estimates. Total losses from 37 nations to these scams is almost $3.2 billion. The United Kingdom has the second-highest losses at $520 million.

Tens of thousands of victims worldwide fall victim to the scams each year --- and while the losses per victim are decreasing due to more scammers working the lower-amount swindles (like phony money orders, lottery fraud and auction overpayment schemes), the number of victims are increasing, the Dutch firm reports on its Web site. The Internet Crime Complaint Center estimates that, based on complaints it received, the average loss to a 419 swindle last year was $5,000. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Internet-related fraud complaints involving a "wire transfer" of money as the payment method --- typical of 419 scams --- more than tripled from 2004 and 2005.

Mazur says that since the explosion of the Internet, these criminals can spam a whole group of individuals at home and at work and have gained wide access to an unsuspecting public. "If they put out 100,000 e-mails and two people bite," he says, "it would be a successful day."

Adding to the success of these scams is the number of sophisticated variations. In late March, a rash of e-mails targeted bed-and-breakfast inns nationwide. Scammers made reservations, purportedly for a UNICEF representative in Ghana. Payments arrived as cashier's checks for too much money and the scammers asked that the difference be returned.

Last August, the 419 scammers stooped so low as to take advantage of the London terrorist bombings, informing e-mail recipients they'd been left money by one of the victims. "These schemes run the gamut of sounding very lucrative, but there is that questionable arrangement," Mazur warns.

Rich Siegel has a few words of advice. "No one is going to give you $12 million. . . . You don't have a long-lost uncle who died in a car accident on Sagbama Road in the jungles of Nigeria. You never purchased the winning ticket in a sub-Saharan international lottery," he writes on his Web site.