The other day I received this e-mail from the International Reconciliation and Logistics Vault, United Nations Office of Compensational Settlement of Escrow Accounts:
This e-mail promises to secure $8 million that is apparently due to me if I will send $290 to cover the transfer charge. Note that the e-mail is signed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon his own self, so this has to be the real deal, right? Thus, I naturally have sent the $290 and, in anticipation of my promised fortune, have made a down payment on an eighteenth-century chateau in France. Thirty rooms. Four wine cellars. Marble floors. Crystal chandeliers. Butlers for the maids. Maids for the butlers. A gold-plated bidet in every room.
This e-mail is especially ludicrous because it is of the mangled-English type designed to reduce false positives from recipients. I regularly receive both articulate and inarticulate e-mails promising me an easy fortune. In fact, if I don’t receive at least one such scam a day I feel downright slighted.
Perhaps you, too, receive such manna from cyberheaven: from an obscure office of the United Nations or a bank in Africa, from a barrister in England, from a dying woman in New Braunfels or a dying man in Benin, from GIs in Iraq who have found Saddam Hussein’s hidden gold, from a large chunk of the population of Nigeria, even from FBI Director Robert Mueller.
All of these people—total strangers unto me—want to give me bushel baskets full of money. Is that not touching? Does that not restore your faith in humankind? I can’t tell you how moved I am, how humbled and grateful I am as I—with tear in eye and tremble in chin—read these e-mails and click on the “delete” button.
But although such scams are perpetrated by e-mail, they are not recent inventions of our high-tech times. Their message—the promise of easy money—is old. Only their medium—mouse and modem instead of paper and pen—is new.
Few swindles are as complex as the Norfleet case or as bloody as the Holmes case, but most swindles have one element in common: Their success depends on conning a “mark” who has the two g’s: greed and gullibility.
And so it is with the advance-fee swindle, also known as the “Nigerian money-transfer fraud” or the “419 scam,” 419 being the number of the section of the Nigerian penal code that prohibits such fraud schemes. Such schemes are the cyberdescendants of an older scheme, the Spanish prisoner swindle, which can be traced back at least to the late sixteenth century. In this con the conner typically writes a letter to a mark (the connee) saying that the conner is in correspondence with a wealthy person who has been imprisoned. The prisoner is relying on a confidante on the outside (the conner) to raise money to buy the prisoner’s freedom. The conner asks the connee to put up some of the money and promises that the connee will be rewarded most handsomely after the prisoner is freed.
This New Orleans Times-Picayune column speaks of the Spanish prisoner swindle as being well known in 1896.
This New York Times article of 1898 says the swindle had been around for thirty years.
This 1905 San Francisco Call front-page spread details the arrest of a Spanish prisoner swindle gang.
In 1922 and 1927 the Dallas Morning News printed full-page exposes of cons such as the Spanish prisoner swindle.
And these Star-Telegram clips (top two from 1912, bottom from 1920) show that the swindle wasn’t fooling folks in Fort Worth a century ago. Even back then folks knew: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Unless, of course, it’s from Ban Ki-Moon of the United Nations his own self.
In which case, break out the Burgundy, warm up the bidets, and au revoir, y’all.
(In case you want to savor the particulars of my good fortune, below is the e-mail in a larger image.)
I’ll make things even simpler – send me the amount of money of your choice and I’ll leave comments here in return. Such a deal, with no Nigerian connection either. Back in the day, the swindlers were not Nigerian, so this MUST be the real deal!
Steve and Bryan, these scams fascinate me because they tell me that even though you and I laugh at them (their implausibility, their painful spelling and grammar, etc.), SOMEone occasionally takes the bait. Otherwise these scams would dry up after all these years. Who falls for them? These scams are targeted at people with e-mail. I picture people with e-mail as being more worldly and educated than people without e-mail. I can’t figure it out.