Scam Letters: 542 different examples!
By date received, with names of supposed senders, country where the money is supposed to have originated, and amount. Many duplicates omitted. Many of these emails have been reformatted for readability; the recipient's email address, and all angle brackets or HTML tags were removed. All of the other email and postal addresses, phone numbers, etc., are as given in the email, but be warned, do not attempt to contact the perpetrators!. They are ruthless and violent criminals.
How does the fraud work?
The bait is the fictional millions of dollars described in each one of these letters. The goal is to get you to come up with money for the "expenses" required to transfer those millions to you. The victim thinks, a few hundred or a few thousand dollars is trivial when $31 million is at stake. Each demand for more money is claimed to be the very last obstacle before the big money is released. Sometimes, the victim is lured to Nigeria, where even worse things happen.
How did they get my email address?
Exactly the same way all spammers get your email address. Spammers "harvest" email addresses mentioned on web sites. Others run "dictionary attacks" — programs which query mail servers if they have an address AAA100, AAA101, AAA102, etc. That's why you get tons of unsolicited commercial email even if you've kept your email address a secret. And spammers sell each other CD's with millions of addresses. Remember that practically all spam email is fraudulent anyway, so there is no reason why sellers of penis enlargement pills and vinyl siding wouldn't sell lists of email addresses to Nigerian scammers.
Why is it called "Nigerian Fraud"?
Regardless of the country or countries mentioned in the letter -- even countries located outside of Africa -- the fraudsters are usually from certain families or gangs based in Lagos, Nigeria.
Some relevant books:
- Duane Swierczynski, The Complete Idiot's Guide To Frauds, Scams, and Cons
- Gary Baines, Nigerian Scams Revisited
- Harold Baines, The Nigerian Scam Masters : An Expose of a Modern International Gang
- Nigerian White Collar Crime (hearings before the U.S. House Africa Subcommittee, 1996)
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