A Day in the Life of a Nigerian Scammer

prostoalex writes "The media made a Nigerian scammer's career look too easy. Get online, introduce yourself as a corrupt government official willing to take the money out of the country, and wait for the wire transfers from victims to start rolling in. So, the Associated Press takes us through a day in life of Nigerian scammer. It's a life that takes place in Internet cafes with aged screens and free Webmail accounts. However, by the end of the article the AP talks about some people who have made a good career out of it - three cars, two houses. That is, until the next crackdown comes along."

Comments

419 eaters

[Eugene]

http://www.419eater.com/ is a nice place to see the successful story against 419 scammers

Nigerian Internet Relay scam calls

[Anonymous Coward]

I work as a relay operator that does Internet Relay calls which are for the deaf and hard of hearing. They log in, type in their message and we speak it to the person they want to call. Pretty useful for someone who can't hear. Plus it's a pretty easy job that lets me study between calls.

Unfortunately , Nigerians have discovered this service, and are using it to do scams. Roughly 90% of all Internet Relay calls we get now are Nigerians doing scam calls. There's nothing we can do because it's a mandated service by the government.

But it's damn annoying to have to relay for someone you KNOW is a Nigerian scammer. Management doesn't do anything because we get paid if it's a scam call or not.

Meh. No really.

"PLS I MR JOHNSON JOHNSON FROM NIGERIA PLS I WANT 2 BYE 500 PUPPIES TO SHIP TO LAGOS NIGERIA I HAVE 5000 DOLAR MONEY ORDER GAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGA"

Anyways, if you ever get a relay call, for god's sake, don't accept a money order to ship anything to Nigeria.

(posted as Anonymous Coward for obvious reasons)

Re:Nigerian Internet Relay scam calls

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course I did something.
 
I complained to management. Everyone here complains about Nigerian calls. We make fun of them. We use every damn technicality to get rid of them as fast as we can. Because everyone was so angry about having to do those calls we had a big meeting last month with management. I told them I get over 100-150 prisoners trying to either chat up with a female operator or trying to make a free call through us (speech to speech). Ugh. But if it's not the hundreds of Nigerians, or the prisoners, it's the near constant teenagers doing prank calls.
 
What we were told is that the Nigerian problem though is a problem for all relay call providers in the US. It has been for years. While I blame management, technically it's the FCC's fault for mandating that we process all calls verbatim.
 
Simply put, currently, a relay operator has to relay everything verbatim and can't hang up on any caller no mater what. If we do hang up on them, we can get fined. Yay. I hate management for not pushing the FCC hard enough on this. I hate the Deaf and Disabled telecomunications program for not listening to complaints. Nobody cares.
 
Thankfully I graduate next semester so it'll be someone else's problem.

Re:Nigerian Internet Relay scam calls

[zakezuke]

Even if that involves the perpetration of a crime?

Federal rules require them to make the calls and keep the contents strictly confidential, even if the relay operator suspects fraud.

What a sad, sorry loophole these relay operators are in if that's the case

You've said it.

This can't be right at all. No person or agency government or otherwise can ask another person to participate in a crime

They are not participating in a crime no more so than a telephone is participating in a crime. They are relaying words on a system that's designated to allow the deaf over terminals tty or otherwise. That is their job and fuction as designated by the FCC. They are not a person but a relay... they have NO legal accountability what so ever.

Is the post office participating in a crime when they deliver those 419 scam letters? Hell no.

Their job is to read what's on a screen and to type what they hear... and that is it.

As a doctor there is NO way I can hide behind patient confidentiality and allow harm to come to my patient or others. I _have_ to report it to authorities. I also have to attempt to warn the potential victim, believe it or not. Why should "privacy" permit a crime to occur? There's something wrong there.

Why should privacy permit a crime to occur? Because people have rights. What you would sugest would amount to a phone tap for all deaf users. It's generally believed that the deaf should have the same rights as anyone else... hince this wacky loop hole scammers are using. If I were to commit a crime and the only evidence was a an illegal phone tap.... well guess what... it's not admissible.

I would agree, something needs to be done... but at the same time people like your self have to realise that this is a system designed to give the deaf the same access to the telephone network as hearing users... with the same level of privacy.

But you are right "something" needs to be done... something that protects the spirit of the system but make it easier to report and blacklist fraudsters.

And this is how I scammed the scammer.

[TheGlover]

And this is how I scammed the scammer. Don't you just hate those offers to buy a laptop outside of eBay from someone in Nigeria via fake money order? Yeah, me too. Check out this article on my website where I scammed the scammer! http://www.theglover.net/home/node/56

Re:Lameness filter?

[MillionthMonkey]

It appears to pass because it exceeds 3000 bytes in length. If you trim the post to 3000 bytes or less it gets rejected with the YELLING message.

Re:Why Nigeria

[daremonai]

The answer, of course, is that they don't all come from Nigeria. In the 90(!) of them I have received in the last week, they've come from the Netherlands, the UK, Palestine (via France and Ireland), Burkina-Faso, the UAE, China, Iraq (via Switzerland), the Philippines, Cote d'Ivoire [Ivory Coast], Benin, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Spain, India, Liberia, the Congo, Russia, Togo, Swaziland, Ghana, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Senegal, and a couple labeled vaguely "West Africa" or just "Africa." Oh, and a passel of them from Nigeria, of course. [I'm just reporting the nominal origins of the mail here; often this is faked, of course. In fact, a lot of the allegedly Nigerian mail really comes from South Africa or other places.]

Looking over this crop, it does appear Nigeria still has first place, but the UK, the Netherlands, and Russia in particular are moving up fast. So it's not just a third-world thing.

To answer your other question, I guess scammers in the US are too busy phishing to bother with relatively labor-intensive deals like the typical Nigerian scam.

And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have a job where my email address has to be prominently posted on a number of web pages. And yes, I do have 3 layers of spam filtering on the account - these all came out of the spam trap.

Re:Have a heart.

[Ponzicar]

A different time? Have you never heard of PT Barnum, pyramid schemes, snake oil, and patent medicine? Or on this matter specifically: "This type of scam takes different forms of disguises and dates back to 1588 where it was known as the 'Spanish Prisoner' scam." From http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/amazing_offers /frauds_hid.asp or see: http://www.answers.com/topic/spanish-prisoner While I know there are some old timers out there, I don't think any were around before the 16th century.

Slashdot frontpaged a scam site!!

[mattr]

Boy this was a shocker. Anybody notice the domain the story comes from? iwon.com may belong to askjeeves, but I KNOW I get spam from iwon.com that I never signed up for.

And look at all their (apparently lucrative) advertisers! Let's see, you can buy Hoodia, Investigate Anyone Anywhere, incredible reload the page and there are more and more banners and text ads.

What is scary is that it looks partially legit, in that my guess is they actually do run some kind of lottery (I wonder what the legal basis is for running a lottery on the net, sounds awfully lucrative). But I am pretty sure that iwon spams, and that their advertisers are bigger spammers.

So if the article is about a "cheeky" move by a Nigerian posing as the head of the antifraud department, then I find a spammer posing as a news site, carrying a news story about how spam pays off, and getting paid to do it by spammers, who are getting their page hits from slashdotters who hate spam, to be a utter masterpiece of cheekiness. My hat is off to you Iwon, you won!

Another thing I would like to note for all those slashdotters who are still laughing and unconvinced (and especially the dude who got past the lame filter and posted an all caps Bush spam message). I am guessing that any people who still get caught by these things are disadvantaged somehow.

Either they are kids with money, or depressed, or schizophrenic, or fanatically religious, or something, but they are missing something in the immune system that everyone else has. Personally I find the all capitals letters to be especially worrisome. There is most likely a large amount of mental illness in the world not being treated, or treated unsuccessfully, or the result of a temporary fugue of some sort such as normally makes people suicidal. Maybe there are even people who figure someone, anyone else could use the money better than themselves and this is a way of hurting themselves.

At the very least, it is now mainstream knowledge that just about anyone will cave in if shouted at and abused enough. I strongly believe that the shadiness of Iwon, and the sheer volume of spam with its various types of shouting, exerts a significant pressure on people. This story is about how that works really well, about how it is a natural outcome of a burgeoning, talented, but wild west style country, and about how it still pays if you walk the fine line like Iwon.com does.

It sounds like a primer that the flopped dotcommers of the next thread should have read before going through their money. One dotcom they mention closed down before using all its cash, while one scammer in the article made 250 million bucks, about 10 times as much, only gave back a tenth of it, and presumably had a nother 200 million left after the 2 years of prison! Who's laughing now?

Ever been tempted to respond just to mess with em?

[Solarbeat]

This guy did: http://www.yrad.com/ It takes some real talent to put together some of his replies...

Well deserved

[etzel]

I have yet to see a Nigerian scam message that looks legit. People who fall for these things are too ignorant or too desperate to make a quick buck. Shame on you rednecks!