Man Arrested in Australia Over Nigerian E-mail Scam

slasher_14 writes "A 39 year old Sydney man has been arrested over the Nigerian Scam. Simultanious raids were conducted in two homes by police, who siezed computers and documents. Over the last 6 months, Australian police have tracked about 1.5 million dollars. The man faces Dubbo Local court today, charged with 17 offenses." Hopefully this means my inbox will be seeing less of these e-mails.

Comments

Bit player

[Carnildo]

17 offenses? $1.5 million? Sounds like he's a small-time wannabe. Don't expect any noticable reduction in the number of scams in your mailbox.

Re:Bit player

[frankthechicken]

It's not just the money, it's the fact there were that many people willing to give up information so easily that makes it so scary. It just shows why security is so bloody hard to maintain. You cannot ever have a truly secure system whilst relying on people who don't know the power/value of their OWN personal information, let alone someone else's.

Re:Bit player

[nordicfrost]

The con artists of the Nigerian scams don't actually make a lot of money. The millions and millions of dollars they claim to have don't exist of course, and they make money by saying they need "5000 USD for plane tickets, 1000 for charges when moving the money" etc.

It is rare for these scams to bring in more than some thousands per sucker. If they strike gold, the sucker would actually go to Nigeria of whereever, be kidnapped and held for ransom. That's where the big bucks is in this buisness.

Re:Thank God we're seeing more of this

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean this in all sincerity: don't you think it's kind of selfish that you are happy you're getting one less spam in your inbox, while some people are the victims of actual fraud, and from the looks of it, relatively high budget fraud at that?

Re:Thank God we're seeing more of this

[bigsteve@dstc]

Fuck your inbox; try sparing a thought for the (admittedly silly) people who got suckered by these scams.

Please explain how "sparing a thought" for someone who can been conned does them the slightest bit of good?

Even someone who has been conned by one of these scams will appreciate the good in keeping them out of everyone's mail boxes ... even if it is only to protect others from being scammed!

Re:Thank God we're seeing more of this

[TekPolitik]

Please explain how "sparing a thought" for someone who can been conned does them the slightest bit of good?

There is reputedly a saying among con artists - "you can't con an honest man." The Nigerian scams are a prime example of this. A core part of the scam is that the victim thinks the money is coming from a breach of the law. The victims are not only stupid, but dishonest, and thoroughly deserve to lose their money.

On the other hand the perpetrators are also crooks, and deserve their punishment.

Of course there is a different situation when the victim uses somebody else's funds to participate in the scam, as has been known to happen - then an innocent party loses out to two crooks.

Like all other branches of gov't

[swb]

"We get a lot of mail complaining about people committing crimes via email. But since we're only really interested in arresting terrorists and drug dealers, we don't have the resources to go after these people. And even if we did, we think this is just an aggressive sales model, or so our Wall Street overlords tell us."

The ideal punishment

[mnmn]

The Aussi courts should really let the guy go. They should just release his picture, name, address, phone number, addresses of his relatives and friends, the name of his college, and they should track him and keep the public updated about his whereabouts. The ensuing witchhunt will demonstrate the public's true willingness to put in effort to get rid of spam.

If this was Saudi Arabia, they would tie him to a post and let anyone who has received more than 1000 emails in one day give this guy a bonk in the nose. I know I would pity him real soon.