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1. You are being manipulated.
2. The degree to which you're aware of this fact determines your ability to choose.

Persuasion is nothing new or necessarily evil. We tend to modify our own environment for our own benefit. That environment often contains people.

Unless you're planning to take action to change the situation, crying about it is a waste of time. If you don't like it, do something about it. Learn to recongize other people trying to get you to do what they want. Use the knowledge to get them to do what you want. If you want them to leave you alone, convince them to do that.

Some reading to get you started:

• A vast, fairly neutrally presented collection of methods.
• A somewhat more cynical collection of cons

Think if all the Nigerian children had access to internet, perhaps then we would be oversaturated with 419 scams, and people would get some commonsense.

(I actually do hope they will take advantage of people in the rich world. Sadly I'm guessing almost all of these children are to decent for that)

This is a better description of the pigeon drop scam...

http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Crimes/InPerso n/MajorPerson/pigeon_drop.htm

No idea. I'm only vaguely aware of how these things operate. Here's some examples of this sort of scam though http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Nigerian/niger ian_auction_scams.htm. Presumably it relies on people being way to naive to consider it might be a scam.

From here, rather.

I see a lot of people decrying the 9-year length of sentence as excessive. I'd like to promote the idea that its actually lenient, given the harm to society.

First, for those who haven't RTFA, this guy's crime wasn't just "spamming", it was the electronic equivalent of mail fraud. Take a look here for mail fraud penalties. Yup - that's right. Up to 5 YEARS per occurance. Not per person actually defrauded, but per mail sent.

Furthermore, we seem to want to punish "blue collar" crime (physical violence and theft) as somehow more heinous than "white collar" crime (usually fraud and theft of money or intangible property). As a poster above noted, blue collar crime tends to have a severe impact on a very limited number of people, though in the aggregate it also attacks a locality's social fabric (consider the number of violent crimes in someplace like South Central LA and the correlation to property values there). White collar crime, however, tends to impact a large number of people to a lesser extent, but also directly attacks the fundamental underpinnings of the society: in particular, the fundamental trust in fairness and shared responsibility that is essential for modern societies to function.

Fraud in particular is a particularly heinous crime from a societal standpoint, as it attacks the basic trust we put in financial transactions. A CEO giggering quarterly numbers is doing more than just cheating some stockholders out of a few cents in stock price - he's attacking the whole investing system which depends on truth in information dissemination. For if investors can't trust that a company's 10k annual report has real numbers, how can they invest?

White collar crime needs to be far more heavily punished than it currently is. And, it is much more deterred by increased prosecution and higher penalties than blue collar crime. Blue collar crime is generally only deterred by increased police presence (i.e. preventative measures) and not by increased penalties. White collar crime, on the other hand, generally shows a strong correlation to the likelihood of prosecution and severity of penalty. This is due to the fact that most white collar crime is committed by the more wealthy segment of the population, who generally do a risk analysis before committing the crime (i.e. "I'll steal $100,000 from the company, if I'm only 10% likely to get caught and only face 3 months in jail, but won't steal if I've a 50% chance of getting caught or if the sentence will be 5 years").

Also, remember that as "non-violent" criminals, white collar criminals tend to get put in low-security prisons, which cost much less to maintain than those in for violent crimes.

Overall, I'd like to see us start to put the emphasis on white collar crime instead of blue collar crime. In the big picture, I think it's far more damaging to society, and is far more frequent than people think.

There are some issues with this case (more specificly, the technicalities of the anti-spam law), but in the big picture, I think the sentence is exceedingly fair.

-Erik

From what I understand (I'm not an expert but I've read a little), the people who these scammers appeal to often aren't the people who are simply greedy. They're the people who've been told that they need a $100,000 payment on their home within a month or they and their kids will be kicked out of the home that's been in their family for generations

Let's see then. Here are some victims found by a Google search (top links chosen)

• awprofessional.com wrote: In July 2001, the Times of London reported that a former mayor of Northampton fell for the 419 scam, and ended up in Johannesburg, South Africa with a gun to his head.. Not certain, but more likely to be greed than desperation.
• In the same URL, And in 1999, a Romanian businessman, Danut Mircea Tetrescu, was kidnapped and held for a half-million dollar ransom.. Hmm, "Romanian businessman". More likely greed?
• In the same URL we also have Kjetil Moe, a Norwegian millionaire who had fallen for the 419 scam. Definitely greed.
• El Reg writes of a woman who stole $2.1m from the law firm of which she was an employee (a bookkeeper). The Reg analyses it for us: greed and stupidity in equal measure.
• Wired wrote 2+ years ago of two losses of $78k and $74k, but no actual explanation of the motives of the victims.
• This dude writes that he was taken in out of folly.
• Finally a more professional website offers a summary,

  From earlier sections you might have picked up the impression that only seniors are deceived by offers of instant wealth. Nothing could be further from the truth. While it is true that seniors are targeted for sweepstakes offers the mechanics of telemarketing and investment fraud are simply enhanced and modified for attacking various targets of opportunity.

  This particular scam targets middle class, middle age, business and professional men who would never be as easily deceived by a lottery scam. Estimates put the losses from these "Nigerian Advance Fee" operations at over $1 million "every single day" in the U.S. alone.

Apparently his disability is a mental illness.

http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Nigerian/niger ian_busts_2003.htm

One of my favourite anti-spam sites (including the name) is What's the bloody point?? I especially like bait number 8 featuring Miss Maureen Adje Charlse only surviving daughter v Norman Gorman Smith-Bidet III & Gonad McDangle.

The amount of garbage I've seen in email, snail mail, and cable TV has started to turn a mental red flag on: Beware of anything that comes from a Florida address.

It's not just spam. I've seen bogus sweepstakes from Clearwater, but most importantly, a vast majority of those "minimum investment required" "business opportunities" (the usual fodder of late-night cable TV ads) all come from south Florida...note all the addresses of the defendants in this comprehensive list.

The state, to me, seems to produce a disproportionate amount of schemes, spam, and crap. If I were a legitimate businessperson in southern Florida, I'd be really pissed because of all the negative associations.

Which of course begs the question--what is it about Florida that attracts such low life businesses? Mob connections, ineffective leadership, bad judicial processes?

That seems to be the attitude amongst upper-management types (PHB's, "management weenies", etc.) these days and now, apparently, we find it's not just a problem here in the U.S. but it's a global "problem" (which, if we blow this thing way, way out of proportion and up to near ridiculous extremes -- and isn't that always fun? -- may just make a good thing (tm) out of it; as long as I have a job that supports my family and I can do it from home -- meaning "my homeland", not necessarily my house -- who cares if my PHB is on another continent?!?! We export jobs to India, who exports jobs to Isreal, who exports jobs to Pakistan (I know, unlikely, but just play along...), who exports jobs to Germany, who exports jobs to...US -- we could indirectly end up working for ourselves again!)
Of course, all this sounds suspiciously pyramidical ...

Won't someone think of the Nigerians!

<G>

Anyone who has lived in a cave for the last two years and isn't aware of the Advance Fee Fraud scheme, which is run out of Nigeria, most other west African countries south of the Sahara, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands as of the last time I checked my spamtrap, should check out the following URLs:

crimes-of-persuasion.com: Nigerian 419 Advance Fee Fraud
U. S. Secret Service: Advance Fee Fraud Advisory
The 419 Coalition Website

Believe it or not, there have been billions lost to this scam, from people who should have been smarter. (And less greedy.)

• Warnings and Cautions for Writers -- Vanity and Subsidy Publishers -- Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America
• Fraudulent Vanity Press Publishing of Manuscripts and Poetry -- Crimes of Persuasion: Schemes, Scams and Frauds

Stupid Americans have been bilked out of thousands of dollars,
lured to Africa and (as described in this state department pdf) murdered.

Not saying you're necessarily courting death by jerking a spammer's chain but you might want to consider that some of these Nigerian fraudsters are serious thugs.

Would you make prank calls to Furio?

If a company decides it's sucess is reliant on attracting investors, then of course it must make a profit.

I'm not sure if you were aware of this or not, but your introductory statememt is almost a textbook definition of a ponzi scheme.

From what I have heard, it isn't so much spammers as scammers. They are shutting down the illegal scams.

Indeed. I've had five versions of this scam over the past few weeks. Nasty.