The Nigerian 419 scam, also known as advance fee fraud, the Nigerian scam and other names is basically a confidence game where con artists contact victims by letter or (more commonly today) spam email with a story about a need to transfer money overseas or an opportunity to receive a great sum of money. You’ve probably received this type of scam in your own inbox at some stage (if not regularly) advising you that you won an Internet Lottery, that an inheritance is available to collect or that the exiled prince of the Sudan needs help transferring money out of the country.
The scam works when the con artist explains that some money is required up front from the victim to release the funds or to cover the cost to set up the transfer of funds. Sometimes, the con artists will actually send a check which the victim can deposit but then request that some money be sent to release the remaining amount. This causes some who might initially be skeptical to think that it must be legitimate. Of course, after sending the money to release the remaining amount, the victim realizes that the check they deposited bounced and they are out of pocket.
These scams have been in play since the early 1980s and work because they play to gullible people’s emotions, desperation and naiveté.
Because of the complexity of the scam, it is difficult to prosecute the scammers. Money is usually requested by wire transfer, which can’t be canceled or traced when sent internationally to some countries.
Today, a growing number of people (referred to as scam baiters) are taking the scammers on in vigilante fashion; trying to waste their time, cause them frustration and even send them on international wild goose chases in an attempt to discourage them from participating in the game and prevent them from victimizing others.
“…As it turns out, the scam-baiter demographic is more diverse than one might think, though much of the reasoning for participating is the same. “My initial reason for baiting was to give myself an outlet for the practical jokes that I am ‘too old’ to play on my dog/little sister/friends/neighbor’s cat,” a 32-year-old baiter who goes by blah told Ars. “But after I joined 419eater, I realized that we actually do make an impact on the entire scamming business by running interference and wasting these scammer’s time.”
The things baiters do to scammers range from “boring,” menial tasks like seeding false information or questionable wording into the scamming community (tasks that don’t necessarily bring the glory, but are equally necessary) to sending scammers on full-on safaris across Africa—or sometimes, the globe—in search of money that will never come. The baiters we spoke with said that they spend anywhere from a an hour per day (usually arranged around other things, like TV or just casual Internet surfing) to a full 8 to 10 hours per day, especially if they are working on a collaborative safari…” continue reading
Of course, although some young con artists might be discouraged to continue running the scams after getting punk’d by a scam baiter, the practice will continue; because, for others, there is a pay off. In 2006, a study found that these types of scams attributed to losses of over £150 million every year in the UK alone. Just last year, a woman in the United States was conned out of $400,000 when she was led to believe that her long-lost grandfather willed her a large sum of money.
