Advance-fee scam
1830, appears very similar to emails today: "Sir, you will doubtlessly be astonished to be receiving a letter from a person unknown to you, who is about to ask a favour from you..." and goes on to talk of a casket containing 16,000 francs in gold and the diamonds of a late marchioness.
[23][24] The spread of e-mail and email harvesting software significantly lowered the cost of sending scam letters by using the Internet in lieu of international post.
[27] For example, in 2007, the head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission stated that scam emails more frequently originated in African countries or in Eastern Europe.
[36] Many scammers tend to come from poorer and more-educated backgrounds, where Internet access and better education, along with inability to afford basic necessities, drive people into committing online fraud.
They could also have been influenced by social media celebrities and artists who promote scamming as a "cool" trend to quickly gain access to luxury items like sports cars and fashion.
[6][42][43] Such people, who may be real people being impersonated by the scammer or fictitious characters played by the con artist, could include, for example, the wife or son of a deposed African leader who has amassed a stolen fortune, a bank employee who knows of a terminally ill wealthy person with no relatives or a wealthy foreigner who deposited money in the bank just before dying in a traffic accident or a plane crash (leaving no will or known next of kin),[44] a US soldier who has stumbled upon a hidden cache of gold in Iraq, a business being audited by the government, a disgruntled worker or corrupt government official who has embezzled funds, a refugee,[45] and similar characters.
[47] The sums involved are usually in the millions of dollars, and the investor is promised a large share, typically ten to fifty percent, in return for assisting the fraudster to retrieve or expatriate the money.
[7] Once the victim's confidence has been gained, the scammer then introduces a delay or monetary hurdle that prevents the deal from occurring as planned, such as "To transmit the money, we need to bribe a bank official.
[7] Sometimes psychological pressure is added by claiming that the scammers' side, to pay certain fees, had to sell belongings and mortgage a house or by comparing the salary scale and living conditions in their country to those in the West.
[citation needed] Recipient addresses and email content are copied and pasted into a webmail interface using a stand-alone storage medium, such as a memory card.
[57] There, police seized thousands of Nigerian and non-Nigerian passports, 10,000 blank British Airways boarding passes, 10,000 United States Postal money orders, customs documents, false university certificates, 500 printing plates, and 500 computers.
Other non-cancellable forms of payment include postal money orders and cashier's cheques, but wire transfer via Western Union or MoneyGram is more common.
[63] Some services go so far as to mask the sender's source IP address (Gmail being a common choice), making the scammer's country of origin more difficult to trace.
[citation needed] They then send out masses of unsolicited SMS messages to victims stating they have won a competition, lottery, reward, or an event and that they have to contact somebody to claim their prize.
Even when traceable, they give out long and winding procedures for procuring the reward (real or unreal) and that too with the impending huge cost of transportation and tax or duty charges.
In these cases, scammers use TRS, a US federally funded relay service where an operator or a text/speech translation program acts as an intermediary between someone using an ordinary telephone and a deaf caller using TDD or other teleprinter device.
In a common strategy, they bind their overseas IP address to a router or server located on US soil, allowing them to use US-based relay service providers without interference.
[citation needed] The scammer contacts the victim to interest them in a "work-from-home" opportunity, or asks them to cash a cheque or money order that for some reason cannot be redeemed locally.
In one cover story, the perpetrator of the scam wishes the victim to work as a "mystery shopper", evaluating the service provided by MoneyGram or Western Union locations within major retailers such as Wal-Mart.
[citation needed] More sophisticated scams advertise jobs with real companies and offer lucrative salaries and conditions with the fraudsters pretending to be recruitment agents.
[citation needed] In 2004, a variant of the lottery scam appeared in the United States: a scammer phones a victim purporting to be speaking on behalf of the government about a grant they qualify for, subject to an advance fee of typically US$250.
[89] The con artist may claim to be interested in meeting the victim but needs cash to book a plane, buy a bus ticket, rent a hotel room, pay for personal-travel costs such as gasoline or a vehicle rental, or to cover other expenses.
[90] In other cases, they claim they're trapped in a foreign country and need assistance to return, to escape imprisonment by corrupt local officials, to pay for medical expenses due to an illness contracted abroad, and so on.
[95][96] The fraudster uses Internet classified websites and print media to lure the public into installing a mobile phone tower on their property, with the promise of huge rental returns.
[99] In the United States, messages are falsely claimed to be from the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA), a real organization, but one that does not and cannot by itself make payments.
Or they may say a fund has been set up by the Nigerian government to compensate victims of 419 fraud, and all that is required is proof of the loss, personal information, and a processing and handling fee.
[108] Other victims lose wealth and friends, become estranged from family members, deceive partners, get divorced, or commit criminal offenses in the process of either fulfilling their "obligations" to the scammers or obtaining more money.
[112] Victims can be enticed to borrow or embezzle money to pay the advance fees, believing that they will shortly be paid a much larger sum and be able to refund what they had misappropriated.
While a court affirmed that various Nigerian government officials (including a governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria) were directly or indirectly involved, and that Nigerian government officials could be sued in U.S. courts under the "commercial activity" exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, Adler was unable to get his money back due to the doctrine of unclean hands because he had knowingly entered into a contract that was illegal.
[120][121][122] The international nature of the crime, combined with the fact that many victims do not want to admit that they bought into an illegal activity, has made tracking down and apprehending these criminals difficult.
