Nigerian Scammers Claim Another Victim

A Florida newspaper ran a story yesterday about a local retiree who fell hard for a 419 scam. The story goes into depth on the methods used to play on the target's beliefs and gain his confidence - in this case, the target (who lost $320,000) is still having a hard time accepting that they were thieves. Truly remarkable.

Comments

It's not a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a voluntary tax on stupidity.

Re:It's not a scam

[Leroy_Brown242]

It's right up there with the lottery.

Re:It's not a scam

[MoonBuggy]

I completely agree. While the scammers should not have tried it to start with, anyone stupid enough to be taken in by something so well documented after being warned by the police deserves to loose anything they put in. Why does nobody ever point out this side of the story? It's always like the victim was an innocent bystander, not a greedy moron.

Re:It's not a scam

[Dan Crash]

"The guy deserved to get scammed! Stupid people should suffer."

Ah, the spirit of Christmas on Slashdot.

Re:It's not a scam

[Khomar]

We should be careful when we attack people like this. Did he make a huge mistake? Yes. Was the mistake a result of caving into greed? Yes. However, millions of Americans are currently putting themselves into similar situations by getting deeper and deeper into debt by taking loans to buy luxury items: a new yacht, a larger house, a fancy new car, etc. The evils of debt and the mounting interest costs is well documented, but it happens time and time again.

While you may not have fallen victim to this particular scheme, are you certain that you have not fallen victim to the "must-have" commercialization scheme so prevalent (and legal) today? Yes, this was a very stupid mistake, but we are all just as capable of making equally stupid mistakes (an investment in the next Enron perhaps).

Do not be so quick to judge and save a little room for compassion. If nothing else, think of his wife who has lost so much and may have had little to say in the decision. Consider the difficulties that they will both face in their marriage as they approach their final years in poverty. This is a heartbreaking story. Do not become so cynical that we lose sight of this.

Re:It's not a scam

[harlows_monkeys]

It's right up there with the lottery

The lottery is occasionally in your favor, when it has gone several weeks without a winner, so the prize is very large. (Yes, that does attract more players, but not enough more to compensate for the larger prize).

The Nigerian scam is never in your favor. :-)

There is an interesting case included in income tax caselaw books, where a consortium of Australian investors tried to buy one of each possible combination for such a lottery. Buying tickets turned out to take longer than they thought, so they only got about half what they wanted, but still won most of the prizes, including all the big ones, and so made a nice profit. The case is in the books because there was some question over how to tax this.

Tax law cases are often a lot more interesting than other cases, because people put a lot more thought into avoiding taxes than they do to most other things. People who would only devote a few minutes to planning a murder will spend weeks trying to figure out how to deduct the cost of the bullets. :-) (This also makes it hard. I've got a B.S. degree in math from Caltech, and never in my life have numbers so confused as they did when we studied partnership taxation in law school)

Re:It's not a scam

[Fnkmaster]

In general, I agree with you, but you have to consider that many of the people who get taken are eldery retirees. In many cases, these people's mental faculties aren't what they were when they were younger. The elderly are unfortunately often the target of overt scams because of this very fact, and because they often have retirement nest eggs.

There really needs to be stronger international enforcement on these scams. These scammers deserve to be taken out with extreme prejudice.

Re:It's not a scam

[Paradise Pete]

Hmm, must some new law of statistics I'm not familiar with.

If the jackpot is large enough, each ticket bought that week will have an average return higher than the cost of the ticket. However, that fact alone does not make it a good bet, because the variance overwhelms the positive expectation.

Re:It's not a scam

[stonecypher]

The lottery is occasionally in your favor

Statistics are funny. Even if it's in your favor, you're still not going to land the sum, so it's still not worth it - unless you're willing to risk a huge amount of money.

As the old saying goes - a variation on what this was started by - the lottery is a tax on those which are bad at math.

I see the 419 scam as a form of social darwinism.

Re:It's not a scam

[stonecypher]

Yeah, and the next time the police come to you and say "this is a scam, don't trust these people you've never seen from the other side of the planet", and you proceed to pump in a third of a million dollars, taking out sixteen credit cards, selling two cars and double mortgaging your home, we'll be laughing at you, too.

Similarly, do not attempt to generate electricity by holding up a lightning rod in a storm, and do not attempt to seem commercially productive by suing for decade-past code publicly authored by someone else.

Re:It's not a scam

[stonecypher]

However, millions of Americans are currently putting themselves into similar situations by getting deeper and deeper into debt by taking loans to buy luxury items: a new yacht, a larger house, a fancy new car, etc. The evils of debt and the mounting interest costs is well documented, but it happens time and time again.

We're not laughing at this dumbass for getting into debt. We're laughing at him for spending three times his monetary worth on something that police had already told him was fake.

While you may not have fallen victim to this particular scheme, are you certain that you have not fallen victim to the "must-have" commercialization scheme so prevalent (and legal) today?

Not to the tune of a third of a million dollars, not once the police had told me not to, and certainly not to sixteen credit cards, two sold cars and a doubly mortgaged house.

I do feel a bit dumb about my $50 electric razor. That's maybe a different caliber of dumb.

but we are all just as capable of making equally stupid mistakes (an investment in the next Enron perhaps).

Did the police tell you not to invest in Enron? Did you hear about Enron via email? Did you invest triple the amount of money you actually had, risking corporate funds loaned to you, on Enron?

If nothing else, think of his wife who has lost so much and may have had little to say in the decision.

I'm not laughing at her. I feel awful for her.

This is a heartbreaking story. Do not become so cynical that we lose sight of this.

Heartbreaking, yes. Uproariously funny, yes. I wouldn't think it was funny if he hadn't been specifically told by the fucking authorities.

Re:It's not a scam

[harlows_monkeys]

Hmm, must some new law of statistics I'm not familiar with

Uhm...you aren't familiar with the formula

Expected payoff = probability of winning * prize if you win

?

You should have got this in the first week of your first statistics course. :-)

Or maybe you aren't familiar with how lottery prizes work? If no one wins, the prize gets added to the next lottery.

The probability of a given ticket winning is the same each week, but the prize goes up. However, more people tend to play as the prize goes up, so the chances of sharing the prize go up, but the net effect is the "prize if you win" term goes up each week.

If a lottery goes a few weeks without a winner, this can push the expected payoff higher than the price of a ticket.

Re:It's not a scam

[Lemmy Caution]

That ignores the utility value of money, which acts as a coefficient to the payoff, rises and falls in a non-linear way, and reacts differently for loss than for gain.

Utility theory is also why it taxing 10% of a blue collar worker's income hurts more than taxing 50% of Bill Gates'. There's a vast difference in value between the utility of 10,000 dollars and 9,000 dollars (it may be the difference between paying rent and not having a home) and less of a relative gulf in utility between 20 billion and 40 billion dollars.

419 Scam Infomercials?

[DaRat]

So, at what point will it become more profitable to run How to Run a 419 Scam seminars than it will be to actually run a 419 scam? Okay judging by the fact that people still get taken in, quite a while, but I can see the infomercials now...

Simply Insane

[OS24Ever]

This is just simply greed run amuck. Not by the scammer - but by the idiot who fell for it.

I can't feel sorry for this guy in the slightest. This guy was a whole lot of stupid. Just insane to fall for something like that and need to spend $320K to get it.

There is a certain personaility type that has to fall for this no matter where it was from. It's not the internet that has caused this, it's just helped people find more idiots to suck in.

Re:Simply Insane

[OS24Ever]

I read the article start to finish prior to posting my comment. The guy is so stubborn and stupid to think that the government of the country is keeping him from his millions, not his friends.

He's an idiot, plain and simple. When given documentation showing it's a scam he won't admit it, and won't even file an official complaint. He's a moron.

He lost everything, yep. He's now a burden on society as a whole completely because he will loose his home, bankrupt off his debt and now the banking & mortgage industries will take the hit for it causing interest rates, and credit ratings to be just that much tighter for us non-greedy types to get a loan and/or credit card.

The banking industry let him get *21* credit cards and cash advance all of them and no one blinked. They started blinking when they didn't get their payments though. That could be the only thing that might need to be fixed, the ability for a person to get *that* many credit cards in such a short time, and for no one to notice.

Re:Simply Insane

[Apreche]

I don't feel bad either. I in fact almost despise this man. Because of his ineptitude there are now drug trafficers in Nigeria who have some positive revenue. Why? Because this dumbass american is a fucking idiot. I feel bad for people who are screwed and it isn't their fault. Like a small child who gets kidnapped from the playground. Or someone who trips and falls into a fire. But if you are this dumb, your life deserves to be ruined. Darwinism at its finest I say.

Re:Simply Insane

[Anonymous Cow herd]

Empathy? If you took all your money and flushed it down the toilet, do you deserve empathy? If you decide it'd be a neat idea to deliberately drive a 6" spike through your shin bone, do you think you're going to get a lot of sympathy?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for empathy... if unexpected medical bills had cleaned out his nest egg, or he'd lost it in some Enron-type pension plan raiding, I'd be Mister Empathy himself.

But the long and short of the story is that he got greedy, he didn't listen to advice from good sources. Jesus Christ, he handed over $300,000 to these guys without even doing any due dilligence. And now he's in denial. This guy deserves everything he got, end of story.

Re:Simply Insane

[jandrese]

I think the "arbitrary level of worthiness" is "didn't inflict it on themselves". We feel bad for people when bad stuff happens to them, we don't feel nearly as bad when they do it to themselves, especially if it is for some unbelievably stupid reason.

Re:Simply Insane

[starling]

Because of his ineptitude there are now drug trafficers in Nigeria who have some positive revenue.

What, you think drug trafficking runs at a loss? The evil drug runners need to use scams like this because they sell of drugs at below cost? Yeah, right. That's progaganda, pure and simple - and you fell for it.

Re:Simply Insane

[RichardX]

It's incredibly easy to denounce this guy as an obvious idiot - indeed, his stupidity seems absolutely breathtaking, and therefore he deserves all the flak he gets....

Or maybe not.
It's always so easy to denounce things from the other side, for example, lack certain beliefs that some other people hold (I'm staying nonspecific here so's not to get into an argument about religion, or whatever).. to me, it seems absolutely staggering that anyone could possibly believe some of the things I don't - but it's never that simple.

This guy is not of the internet generation - he's older. In my experience to many older people the internet is some "magical computery thing" that can do anything. I know people of that kind of age who are every bit as shrewd, bright, and worldly-wise as their years should suggest, but you tell them you can download money from the internet, and they'll believe you.

Secondly, his wife is partially disabled. That's likely to put financial strain on him and his household. Strain = stress, and stress generates emotional rather than rational thinking.

Thirdly, it's often difficult for people to admit they've been taken for a ride - even very smart people. Put yourself in this situation:

You've been offered a bargain.. it all looks legit, and it's something you really don't want to pass up.. A really nice PC/Mac for $100, mebbe.
So, you send off your $100, and after a while you're informed that due to some oversight, the cost is actually going to be $105.

At this point, you grumble.. but what do you do? Risk throwing in the extra $5 for the machine you really, really want, and prove to yourself that you aren't stupid... or prove that you ARE a complete idiot for falling for it in the first place by trying to get your money back?

It's a pretty devious trap. A lot of people would rather spend a little more to get a "good" result.. and will repeat ad infinitum. A little more.. just a little more.. one more bit.. etc. It's an age old con trick, but it's survived this long with good reason.

Anyways, this has turned into something of a long winded rant.. by basic point is - don't be too quick to judge.

somebody should direct him to

[JeanBaptiste]

This site.... that should convince him he was scammed...

Golden rule

[msgmonkey]

If it sounds to good to be true it most probably is. period.

I dont know who came up with that line but it holds true time and again.

For the love of...

[fluxrad]

"His trip to financial ruin began Feb. 2, 2002."

Mr. Sessions, meet P.T. Barnum. Mr. Barnum, please smack Mr. Sessions as hard as you can upside the head.

Ouch..

[MattC413]

I can see why he won't admit to having been scammed, and keeps denying that those people were scammers.

At that age and point in my life, if I were to admit that I were completely scammed out of everything I had worked for my entire life because of a scam that has been around for decades, it would probably make me a broken man.

How long can someone that age live with a broken heart?

Before you start feeling pity for him...

[phorm]

We have to look at the signs. First, we have the obvious there is no free lunch and if it looks too good to be true, it probably is

Next, we find this line:
He ignored police warnings that the deal was bogus and instead blames his losses on corrupt foreign governments
OK, so even the police told him that this would go bad, he continued to dump his money. So now we have "too good to be true" coupled with warnings from the law that he was going to get fleeced

The actual premise of the transaction doesn't even sound legal. A banker needs to move money that isn't his by using an offshore account?

The account had been dormant for years -- ever since the businessman and his family died in a plane crash, the e-mail read. The "banker" needed help moving the money. Otherwise, the government would confiscate it.

That's where Sessions fit in.

And finally the trump:

Still, Sessions was so mesmerized by the well-spoken West Africans that to this day he does not think he was scammed. "I consider them my friends," he says. "They're not criminals."

If this guy had more money and they asked for it, he would give it up. It goes beyond stupid and trusting to the point of insanity. Yes, he's old, but when you've been warned by police and god knows how many others, lost all the cash you have,and face losing your house then you should know you've been robbed.

This guy has more in common with a gambling addict than a victim. He's still not giving up. I really wouldn't be surprised if he would have given to TV preachers or others who might have fleeced him had the nigerian scammers not caught him first.

Re:Before you start feeling pity for him...

[AJWM]

The actual premise of the transaction doesn't even sound legal. A banker needs to move money that isn't his by using an offshore account?

Yep. There's an old saying, "you can't con an honest man". Most big cons have some element of dishonesty (beyond the "getting something for nothing") because it helps to discourage the mark from checking on the legitimacy of the scenario in the first place.

Denial's a wonderful thing isn't it.

[antis0c]

My take is on this is more than likely he knows he was scammed. He would rather believe a lie he knows is a lie than accept the fact he was swindled for all he's worth.

It's easier to blame "corrupt foriegn governments" than it is to blame yourself for being taken in by it. I think the poor guy is just too embarrassed to admit he was swindled.

But did anyone else get the impression off this article like they were really poking fun of him instead of covering a real piece of news. Kinda like, "Look at this stupid old guy, haha"

You know what else is a little odd:

Jim Stratton can be reached at jstratton@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5379.

That just screams, "please send donations." Makes you stop and think, who's scamming who..

A new T-shirt

[attackiko]

"I sent the scammers $320,000 and all I got was this lousy carved wooden elephant and antelope"

Re:A new T-shirt

[lxt]

The Register used to do a great 419 T-shirt, but you can still get an "All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".

I don't think he is a scammer

[andy666]

i helped him out and i made a bundle! with the money, i bought a great house with a fantastic mortgage. then i married a beautiful russian bride, and i pleasure her with my surgically enlarged, viagra driven member. During sex, I take photos and print up hundreds of copies, but hey no problem - I have an excellent source of toner....

Sounds like Scientology..

[jcr]

Get the victim hooked, keep bleeding money out of him until he's ruined, and all along he'll insist that he's not being robbed.

Sad. Very sad.

-jcr

if only

[Camel Pilot]

"I think the Lord uses people to do his work," Sessions said. "With that money, we'd be comfortable, and we could do some good things."

This statement is another way to pc package the concept of greed. If only God would let me win the loto I promise I will use it to do the Lords work - after of course making myself "comfortable".

Alive and Well

[aufecht]

This is exactly why SPAM is thriving and so widespread. Someone, somewhere will fall for anything, no matter how propostrous. A million may complain about SPAM, but it only takes one to buy into the scam. I mean, this one he should have seen a mile away and yet he lost a ton of money. Sad.

I'd laugh, but...

[mblase]

...I lived through the dot-com stock bubble.

You don't have to be old and retired to be seduced by people promising you 500% returns on $50,000 investments. Twenty-somethings will fall for it if you use enough marketspeak.

We're the one's that pay...

[k4hg]

Fine to say it is his fault, and have a good laugh at his expense, but it doesn't work out that way...

As the article says, most of that money is in new debt. He'll never be able to pay it back, so it will become the loss of the finance companies. They will raise the interest rates we have to pay in order to recoup that money.

And of course, since the guy will lose his home and has no money, he'll have to go on welfare to get his rent and food money. He won't be able to pay for his health care co-payments any longer, so he'll bail on those bills, making his doctors and hospitals raise their rates for paying customers and insurance companies.

Yes, he was stupid, his life will be crap, but we are the ones that have to pay for his stupidity!

Feel sorry for him

[Quixote]

It is quite easy, for us (20|30)-year olds to pass judgement on this man. But consider this:

• He is 73
• He and his partially disabled wife needed the money
• He comes from a simpler time, a different era

Please don't be harsh on him.

What if, 50 years from now, there's a scam going around , today, you won't in your wildest imagination consider possible? Would you fall for it? It is possible some of you would.

Please don't deride this old man, but feel sorry for him. He's ruined, with a disabled wife to take care of.

If anything, us young folks also have to share some of the blame in not spreading the message clearly that such things are scams.

Re:Feel sorry for him

[OS24Ever]

Couple problems with this

1. This scam has been around almost as long as he has, The oldest reference I could find is a reuters article in '91.
2. The internet had nothing to do with it, this used to be delivered via fax, and good old US Mail
3. He was greedy, and used god as a reference to fulfill his greedy needs. Just as bad as spending your life savings to win the lottery

I don't buy it. hell the police TOLD him while he was being scammed it was a lie and he disagreed with them.

Re:Feel sorry for him

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

My grandfather, a cop during your simpler time, has told me story after story about hucksters, scammers, con men, and all variety of snake oilers. He is 82, so he lived through the same times as our questionable man. His first reaction on seeing the Nigeria e-mail was to laugh. He even showed me a story from the Orlando Sentinal he had saved (don't remember the exact issue) where they busted a guy for using almost the exact same scam about funding a gold mine. So it's not even an original one.

Aside from which, said old man was warned by friends, family, even the police. No issue there of failing to spread the word. Just a gullible, greedy, old fool.

Re:Feel sorry for him

[nathanh]

It is quite easy, for us (20|30)-year olds to pass judgement on this man. But consider this:

Look, you've pushed a particular button of mine with this one.

* He is 73

Ok.

* He and his partially disabled wife needed the money

Ok.

* He comes from a simpler time, a different era

No, I strongly disagree with this. There seems to be this all-pervasive myth that you go back 70 years and everything was rosy. People left their doors unlocked. Everybody tipped their hats to ladies in the street. Con-artists didn't exist and policemen had nothing better to do than provide consolation to young toddlers who had temporarily lost their mothers while shopping.

It's a nonsense. Go back 70 years and there are drugs, crime and corruption on an incredible scale. The mafia rules several cities. Drive-by shootings are basically invented. Policemen are murdered in their homes. Con-artists swindle the entire population out of their money leading to a rather well known market crash; makes Enron look like a child's tantrum. Hollywood movie stars are involved in drug scandal after drug scandal. You have street gangs, street crime, etc.

You need to lose this rosy-coloured vision of your history. Simpler time? Don't be stupid.

On the other hand...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

If you read a news story about people too dumb to be real...it's probably true!

Scams on the Elderly

[ChuckDivine]

I'm not quick to blame the victim in this case.

My mother is 88 years old. You would not believe some of the scams that target the elderly. The ones I've seen are, surprisingly enough, quite legal. For example, selling reports on lotteries you may have won or soliciting for charities that keep practically all the money for themselves.

Some of the elderly do have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Most do not. For those who do it's partly it's because of problems that happen to people who grow quite old -- and sometimes it's due to having grown up and aged in an era in which normal people were not targeted by frauds.

If the man in this story was, say 43 or 53, I'd be much harsher. But, by 73, he could be suffering from some problems that limit his ability to understand reality.

What should be done? Damned if I know for sure. But I think younger relatives should keep a close eye on their elders. That way you can limit the damage done to Mom or Granddad by this kind of scum.

who uses who

[PinkyGigglebrain]

from the article

Mr.Sessions said "I think the Lord uses people to do his work,"

he forgot the devil does as well.

Scam who?

[AnotherBlackHat]

He borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars, gave it to some one in a foreign country, and now he may go bankrupt.

Why do I feel like the real idiots in this story were the people willing to lend him the money?

-- this is not a .sig

Yup

[Greyfox]

From what I've seen of student loans, universities are more dangerous to the population at large than the Nigerian scammers are. I've seen people go into debt to the tune of 50-60K or more and then go into $20,000-$30,000 per year jobs. You're not buying your future with student loans, you're adding just one more chain that corporate America can use to make you a wage slave.

Of course, that's just my opinion and I'm sure a lot of people have good, positive experiences with the studen loan people...

And Worse Yet

[blunte]

It said most of the 320k was new debt. There's no chance he can pay that debt back, as he can't even afford to pay current living expenses.

That means he'll default on loans and credit card debt, which means creditors will have yet another reason to fleece good customers to make up for the bad ones.

Re:And Worse Yet

[batura]

Uh, it is the creditors responsibility to only grant credit to those that can afford it. The fact that they gave a guy the ability to borrow 320,000 without the chance to repay it is what makes me think about who the true dumbass is in this story: the bank. The guy will file for bankruptcy next week, and they'll (the banks) will be the ones paying for thier greed.

Bull

[Hoi Polloi]

"He is 73"

So he had 73 years of life experience for him to know better.

"He and his partially disabled wife needed the money"

He had no problem burying his wife and himself in debt and putting everything they had in hock for the sake of a scheme that would have made Ralph Kramden (The Honeymooners) blush.

"He comes from a simpler time, a different era"

Bah, I hate that "Golden Age" bullshit. Life wasn't simpler and people act exactly the same as they always have. Some people are liars and cheats, some are greedy fools; time hasn't changed this. People even had fewer people watching out for them (bank insurance, auto insurance, consumer fraud protection, etc) than they do today.

He grew up with Stalin, McCarthy, Hitler, the Depression, countless scams and scandals, and on and on. He wasn't from some innocent time.

Why is this a scam, and televangelism not?

[ColonelPanic]

If this guy had given all his money to a church, it wouldn't be in the news.

What would be amusing

[Joe Tie.]

Is if this actually was true, and there was a rich, confused, Nigerian out there wondering why 100,000,000 English speakers so far have refused his request to make them rich. It's just begging to be made into a wacky sitcom.

The root of the problem...

[X86Daddy]

is that people aren't encouraged to use critical thinking skills. As children, asking why too many times or spotting inconsistencies in explainations is often frowned upon. As adults, questioning your employer is an example of not "being a team player," while questioning your government is "unpatriotic." At any time, questioning an organized religion is usually branded "heretical."

Trust is a good thing. Common sense is good too, but not encouraged as much. Just imagine a world where everyone had plenty of the latter.

And not all debt is bad

[Sycraft-fu]

A house is an asset. All things being equal, it will appreciate over time, and unlike an apartment, your money isn't just being dumped into someone else's pocket.

I'm currently in more debt than I've ever been. I have $100,000 outstanding on a house I got. Before this, I'd never been in debt more than $1000. However, that doesn't mean I'm hurting in a bad way, on the contrary, my mortgage payments are LESS than my rent was, I have one more roomate so I'm paying even less, and now only 5% of what I pay goes to someone else, instead of all of it when I lived in an apartment.

Re:And not all debt is bad

[Frisky070802]

I'm currently in more debt than I've ever been. I have $100,000 outstanding on a house I got....

Assuming your house is worth more than you owe on it, I don't know that this is truly "debt" in the same sense as someone who owes credit card issuers. A debt that is secured by an asset is a completely different animal.

So right, not all "debt" is bad. But neither would I call you in debt over a mortgage. Our friendly scam victim is not only in debt, he's in the doghouse and all that brown stuff that lies around outside that doghouse.

I fell for a scam too.

[Chainsaw Messiah]

I can sympathize with this guy. I fell for a scam too that promised to let me retire in comfort. I don't know how they got my name either. I'm still paying for it today and I'm sure the rest of my life. I'm having 7.5% deducted from every paycheck because of it. Just watch out for these scammers, this group calls themselves "Social Security". I don't know if they're from Nigeria or not though.

419 eater

[swanky]

The grass isn't necessarily greener on the other side of the fence

http://www.419eater.com/index.htm

Re:[OT] Re:It's not a scam

[aastanna]

So who's the bigger geek, you for using 2^32 as an example of a really big number, or me for knowing that 4294967296 = 2^32?

sigh