On Friday, 20/20 ran a pretty good investigative piece on the Nigerian Internet scams that promise large sums of money for a "small" fee. Until recently, Nigerian authorities didn't go after these types of white collar criminals, which is probably why these scams mostly come from there.

These scams have become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon over there to the point that a film and music video were produced that satirize the scams. 20/20 ran clips from the "I go chop your Dollar" video, which showed a man in a fancy looking uniform (presumably pretending to be a high Nigerian government official) meeting with a chubby, lighter skinned man (the "Mugu" or victim of the scam).

The best part of this piece was that they decided to take the scammers' "bait" to see if they could catch these crooks on camera--and they did. Some of the scammers actually sent people to the U.S. to meet with the victims. The 20/20 crew went to Nigeria to document the work of the authorities in catching these scammers. They caught up with one of the scammers that they had been communicating with, and the authorities arrested them.

I noted that none of the scammers who came to the U.S. were put under arrest. I don't remember any explanation being given why this was so.

Wow I didn't even realize that show was still on. Are the hosts still Babs Walter and Hugh Downs?

Interesting...

I've found these guys one of the most bizzare elements of the Internet. Their stuff is usually so obvious, one would wonder why they bother.

P.T. Barnum is alive and well.

There is a counterculture kind of thing that's been going on for quite some time. A number of people have taken to the sport of baiting these scammers, some with great results.

A while back, I followed one of these after having stumbled upon it early on. This guy ended up selling ANUS laptops (normally Asus) to a Nigerian and even got him to pay shipping for a bunch of broken models with ANUS scratched in the screen!

What comes around goes around...

http://postarchives.entensity.net/040105/scam.htm

Hugh Downs retired a few years ago. I think that Barbara Walters left a while later, though they have been running some "best of" Barbara Walters interviews in the last couple of weeks. Brian Ross was the reporter who did this story.

There were some profiles of the scams and some of their victims. Many of these scams are of the more outlandish variety that makes me want to say, "how could somebody fall for that?" (The answer here is greed; one victim of these get rich quick scams was a coronary surgeon--somebody that you would think couldn't be that gullible.) However, a minority of the scams do make claims that are more reasonable, and they take advantage of some people's desire to help total strangers. One such case was of a lady in Alabama who had been contacted by a scammer who posed as a poor Nigerian lady who needed money to pay for medical treatment for one of her relatives. This one was quite sad.

Gullible is the key word here. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is! And those that fall for this garbage deserve to lose everything if you're that dumb to think that you can get something for nothing.

That link Missing provided is hilarious. They had a lot of fun doing the Nigerian scammers in. I can't think of a better way of getting back at them.

People that fall for this scam, are themselves dishonest, as their being asked to help someone break the law, for a fee.

We had what I believe was an attempted Nigerian scam, but didn't fall for it. My wife owns a window covering business, the largest in our state. We had a call from someone who spoke about like the guy in Missing's link wrote. Terrible connection. Wanted (30) 48" by 48" mini-blinds readied for shipment to South Africa. He's have a shipping company pick them up. Asked if we took credit cards. I have no idea how that scam was going to work since we would never ship until cleaeed by the credit card company.

Needless to say, we told him we had no interest in the business. Another guy called several days later with the same story, as if he had never talked to us before. Same outcome. None of these guys could speak very good English. Couldn't pronounce "Omaha".

Several days later, another call, like the first two. This time we told him we only sold face to face. Did he want to meet? He said he didn't have time, he had to catch a plane to the United Kingdom. That ended the calls.

I still haven't figured out how the con was going to work, but I know it was a con. My guess is that he would, at the last minute, decide to Fed Ex a check for the blinds instead of using a credit card. It would be a fraudulent check, probably for $500 too much which he would want us to immediately refund in cash or certified check.

Deane, following that story as it happened was just great. I logged in every day for new news!

It lasted a really long time. Best bait ever, IMHO.

There will be no topping of "The Failure".

If you register, you can follow it to the end conclusion. The baiter gets pictures and everything.

Glad you liked it.

for those of you that read the story. One thing wasn't made clear to me was the American being sarcastic or truthful when he said that there were two Nigerians seen/pictured outside his house?
It was not clear.

/Anyone?

That's actually truthful!

Some of the commentary has been edited from the thread for clarity now, after the whole thing happened. I'm positive I read some discussion on this matter, posted at the time.

This guy was worried over that, until he toyed with them a bit longer. He learned enough to know this was not a big issue.


...so The Failure says.

Honestly, I'm not sure I could pull off this bait! He sacked them for at least three heavy boxes of garbage before it was all over. They paid well over 5K for the lot over the course of about a year or so.

Nuts!

I would be worried for that kind of money, somebody would go do some serious digging...

They could still find the guy today.

The only thing I could possibly think to worry about realistically would be that his store address locally could be easily found. Especially in some photo's where you can make out the business name kiddy corner.