Please, Take All My Money…
I’ve just had a bit of fun learning about the so-called “Nigerian Scams”, you know, where you get a polite email in your inbox from someone you never heard of who claims to be from some foreign country telling all about how the sender has a vast fortune tied up…. perhaps due to political unrest…. And if you help them out you can have a great big fat cut of the swag.
You might even have one in your spam folder right now! (I deleted all mine recently, but I did find a bogus job offer which suggested I might like to send them all my bank account details)
A typical letter might read like this: Dear Sir, Since my husband the former prime minister has died the government has frozen our Swiss bank account holding $22,000,000. Please help us to transfer this money into your country. If you allow us to deposit this into your bank account temporarily we will give you 20% or $4,400,000. Please keep this strictly confidential. Thank you.
And what do you have to do to make this dazzling windfall? If you actually reply, the scammer will ask for some money to help with the transfer of funds, or to bribe an official, or whatever story they think the victim will swallow.
Soooo, you think most people laugh hysterically and immediately hit the delete button?
Unfortunately, not. These con jobs are called Nigerian Scams because when they first started circulating back in the 1970’s, many of them came from the African nation of Nigeria.
In those olden pre-computer days, the scammers sent actual air mail letters to names pulled out of old phone books. Although the volume of snail mail letters was small compared to the electronic glut of emails we see today, by the 1980s officials estimate that 250,000 scam letters were being sent to the US every year.
That’s a lot of postage to pay for, so clearly, people were falling for the con.
Now, of course, we have email and the scammers can send thousands, heck, millions of emails in a single second with the stroke of the send key.
Lots of little scams add up to a lot of loot. The statistics I found are for the USA, where the National Consumers League estimates that the average loss to these scams was just under $6,000 per victim and that in total, Americans are losing $100 million a year!
Statistics are hard to pin down, because once people realize they’ve been had they are frequently too embarrassed to tell anyone.
You might think that the average victims are just ordinary people, who are just naïve and greedy, but vast sums, and I mean really vast sums…have been lost by people who really should have known better.
For instance, about 15 years ago a star money manager and former bank executive in New Zealand was taken for a ride by scammers who told him they wanted him to manage a $30 million Nigerian oil company….but first, he had to help them transfer the money out of the country.
He poured in all his own money, borrowed from his family, and then hit up all his wealthy friends. He ended up losing well over $7 million bucks!
He blamed his catastrophically poor judgement on the pain killers he was taking.
Another form of this scam is that you will receive a letter saying that someone with your last name has died without a will and you can have a cut of the money in their bank account because, hey, clearly you must be a long lost heir!
And this scam has been around for a long time. Back in 1913 thousands of people with the last name of Drake received a letter from “The Sir Francis Drake Association”, an organization founded to settle the estate of the famous explorer who had died in 1596.
Drake had no children when he died, so the letter claimed that the estate was still tied up in probate court and was now worth $22 billion dollars!
Any Drake descendant who wanted to contribute towards the legal fees would get a proportionate cut when the estate was finally settled.
The Sir Francis Drake Association was the work of an Iowa farmer named Oscar Hartzell, who realized that there was more money to be made running a con than a farm. But he didn’t invent the Drake scam….it’s actually been around for several hundred years as similar swindles started within months of Drake’s death.
Hartzell got the idea for his version after his mother got conned out of several thousand dollars in another Drake scam. He tracked down the swindlers, but when he realized how much money they were making he decided to start his own con rather than call the police.
Thousands of people fell for the scam and by the time the feds caught up with him 20 years later he had swindled an estimated 70,000 people out of more than $2 million.
Here’s the best part… rather than admit they’d been duped many of the victims donated an additional $350,000 towards Hartzell’s legal defence!
So, the moral of the story is, if it sounds too good to be true…
