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Nigerian Email Scammers Are More Effective Than Ever (wired.com)
You would think that after decades of analyzing and fighting email spam, there'd be a fix by now for the internet's oldest hustle -- the Nigerian Prince scam. But the problem, a new report suggests, has only grown to become more widespread and sophisticated. From the report: There's generally more awareness that a West African noble demanding $1,000 in order to send you millions is a scam, but the underlying logic of these "pay a little, get a lot" schemes, also known as 419 fraud, still ensnares a ton of people. In fact, groups of fraudsters in Nigeria continue to make millions off of these classic cons. And they haven't just refined the techniques and expanded their targets -- they've gained minor celebrity status for doing it.
On Thursday, the security firm Crowdstrike published detailed findings on Nigerian confraternities, cultish gangs that engage in various criminal activities and have steadily evolved email fraud into a reliable cash cow. The groups, like the notorious Black Axe syndicate, have mastered the creation of compelling and credible-looking fraud emails. Crowdstrike notes that the groups aren't very regimented or technically sophisticated, but flexibility and camaraderie still allow them to develop powerful scams.
On Thursday, the security firm Crowdstrike published detailed findings on Nigerian confraternities, cultish gangs that engage in various criminal activities and have steadily evolved email fraud into a reliable cash cow. The groups, like the notorious Black Axe syndicate, have mastered the creation of compelling and credible-looking fraud emails. Crowdstrike notes that the groups aren't very regimented or technically sophisticated, but flexibility and camaraderie still allow them to develop powerful scams.
Well, by this point, after decades of reports on it, I wouldn't call it "fraud" exactly, more like some sort of tax... Idiot tax? Greed tax? Take your pick.
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Wrong header
It should read: Ever more stupid and greedy people online.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
The Clinton foundation was doing? Send us money now, for a big pay off once I'm in office!
A friend fell hard for an American nurse he meet over the Internet who works for a hospital in Nigeria. This "relationship" went on for a whole year. When he lost his job and started having financial difficulties, I found out about his Internet girlfriend and started asking his questions. It was too late. He wired his entire savings of $5K on the promise that he would get back his money plus $10K to "hold" for her until she got back to the US. When the check didn't show up, the amount that he would hold gradually increased to $20K. He got mad when I told him he got scammed by a Nigarian confidence scammer. The only proof that he has that this "woman" exist are pictures and texts. No video, no audio. A year later he is still waiting for his check, still thinks he has a girlfriend and believes that she is the victim of the Nigerian government because the president is too ill to sign anyone's paycheck.
...mastered the creation of compelling and credible-looking fraud emails.
Really? Because I've never seen one that couldn't immediately be pegged as a 419 scam. The stilted and over formal English is one clue, the almost constant use of a first name for both first and last names ("Dr Thomas James") and the use of impressive titles for people who are in a mundane job (Rev Dr [guy who distributes checks]) are indications.
And, of course, the need for a small payment, regardless of how large and official the organization and sum being discussed may happen to be.
You'd think the UN could deduct the $50 for the courier if they're sending you a check for $27,500,000 US dollars ONLY*. // this offer is legal and entirely legitimate
The success of the Nigerian Scam is a testament to the stupidity of the average user. Anybody who would actually send money to a self-claimed royal personage in a random email deserves to get clipped, IMHO! It obviously doesn't take a genius to set up a free email account. . .
The FBI should start sending out fake Nigerian spam, then sending anyone who responds an automated warning that "if this were a real scam, you'd be broke soon." Call it a mass education campaign.
Just today I got a messenger request from someone in Nigeria. I looked at their profile, and they had all sorts of checkins at glorious sounding hotels and places with the word 'palace' in them. I just marked them as spam, but I'm sure if I let them talk to me, the scam would have started immediately.
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A fool and his money are soon parted
RTFA. This is not the old "I be having footlocker full of money I'll send you, merely needing $USD1000 shipping and customs" scam.
This is (if you're the controller of company.com)
If you're not paying very close attention, cornpany.com looks very much like company.com.
This is absolutely rampant. I hadn't seen that it was the Nigerian mob doing this, but I'm not surprised. They've definitely upped their grasp of English; these are not at all in "419-speak". That lends credence to the theory that the fractured English of the classic "Nigerian Prince scam" was deliberate, to filter out the less gullible.
Because there are many people who are more greedy than smart.
as people get older their brains go. Not always, but there's plenty enough that do. A lot of these people have money from retirement earned before their minds went. The only thing you can do (besides curing age related cognitive decline) is try and keep the scammers away from them.
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They do. Ghana has actually mixed online scamming with witchcraft, they call it Sakawa.
There are more old widows that can afford this shit, and are gullible too
If it wasn't an effective way to con people out of money, it would not have been around for as long as it has and it's been around since the advent of the fax machine. I remember my dad getting these random faxes at work with the same old song and dance, Nigerian up front fee scams.
recently I received
"Hello!
Do not consider on my illiteracy, I am foreign.We uploaded mine malicious program onto your OS.After that I stole all privy information from your system. Furthermore I had some more compromising.The most entertaining evidence which I thieftend- its a videotape with your self-abusing.I installed virus on a porn site and after you installed it. When you chose the video and pressed play button, my deleterious soft immediately downloaded on your system.
After loading, your web camera made the video with you wanking, furthermore it captured exactly the porn video you wanked on. In next few days my virus captured all your social and work contacts.
If you want to erase all the evidence- pay me 760 euro in BTC(cryptocurrency).
It is my Bitcoin wallet address - foobarbas
You have 20 hours since now. If I see transfer I will eliminate the evidence permanently. Differently I will forward the record to all your friends."
As it was long said and attributed (with questionable veracity) to PT Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute." The problem is that increasing technological sophistication and socio-economic complexity have forced us to recalculate the sucker creation rate to something like one sucker generated every 10.5 seconds. Give or take a second due to server load balance issues.
What is described here is an invoice scam (or "billing scam").
https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/types-of-scams/buying-or-selling/false-billing
https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/fraud-az-invoice-scams
https://www.ag.state.mn.us/consumer/Publications/FakeInvoices.asp
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2018/02/phishers-send-fake-invoices
also known as 419 fraud, still ensnares a ton of people
So... about 13 people then.
Surely other countries have spammers too?
Only the first level of scammer is typically in Nigeria. They are the ones who mass send out the e-mails and harvest e-mails from online mailing lists, etc. Once they catch a potential target they pass the account off to someone typically who has a little better English, and frequently living in Europe. They work in teams (if you pay attention, you can catch their e-mail address changing sometime- this is when you're getting passed off to one of the better informed scammers).
There was a big hub of activity out of Amsterdam at one point for the higher level scammers. I'm not sure where they are located nowadays, but Amsterdam was a hub for the higher level scammers back when I followed this 15 years ago.
As for why Nigeria, it was popularized, one person had success and friends found out- and it spread. They also have very little enforcement to prevent people scamming. They have relatively large number of internet cafes (or had... nowadays I'm sure they have cell-phones so could do this from anywhere).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Only problem is that, it's green ($$$) and muddy (like their heads). People are getting more greedy and stupid to boot.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
If an actual Nigerian prince ever gets into a pickle and needs some assistance from strangers, it's good to know that the general public hasn't yet become too jaded to help, and he still has some hope.
Lemme tell you, one day some African noble who will actually have millions in off-shore accounts and only needs $100 to unlock them will try to find people online to help him out and nobody will take him seriously /s There is no patch for stupidity.
Sadly, multi-level marketing and lead trafficking is an un-stopable business endeavor...
Even for semi-legit organizations, say if you donate money to some non-profit. Non-profits often outsource fundraising. If you decide to donate to one non-profit, the fund raising company might actually sell the fact that you donated up the food chain to another larger organization so they can attempt to solicit money from you. This information is a called a "lead" and there are whole businesses built upon selling lead information. The money they make from selling the leads can help to subsidize their business (in addition to the money they skim of the donations). However, once again, you are the product in this scenario, they are selling information about you to who knows who. If you donate to non profits, at a minimum you should look at their donor privacy policy, but realize they often sub-contract their work.
As a more industrial example, basically google adwords is a gigantic lead generating framework which companies dump big money into...
When you look at things from the perspective of business, these low-level scammers are simply generating leads for the high-level scammers...
There is probably lots of confusion between someone claiming to be from Nigeria versus scams actually happening in Nigeria, and vice versa. If I were a Nigerian scammer I would not claim to be in Nigeria because of the country's spamming stigma. For anything mailed, I'd get a buddy in another country to help.
Table-ized A.I.
I've had the same email address since the early nineties, back when we didn't see the harm in having our email addresses in plaintext on Usenet (boy does that sound dumb now) and even despite spam filters I have to wade through junk mail on a daily basis.
Every so often I browse through the email caught by my spam filter, on the off chance that I am missing something important. (I have a photography business and get job offers through email.) The Nigerian Prince, God Fearing Mom, Crooked General, Post Office Worker and the like are pretty common, and if I run across a scam I hadn't heard of before, I'll read through it so I know how to warn friends and family.
The thing is, even the best of them are really poorly written. Syntax is off, language is stilted, word choice is poor -- there's still a lot of indications that these things are written by people with not a lot of education. (So much so that they can be an entertaining read for certain values of humor.)
These things are easy to spot, and have been in the news for, like, ever. Why are people still falling for them? Do victims lack the sophistication to recognize badly written and totally implausible scams?
The snarky part of me wants to add "I blame public schools".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
https://youtu.be/PaD1wKEKXt0
I actually laughed out loud when I read
groups of fraudsters in Nigeria continue to make millions off of these classic cons.
because it's too adorable that whoever wrote that thinks you actually have to be in Nigeria to pull off the Nigerian prince scam...
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these emails are going after people with borderline dementia (or full blown dementia). The reason the instances are ticking up is the boomers are getting older and their brains are going before their bodies. Science can keep their hearts from failing but it can't yet fix the brain.
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My 87 year old mother keeps sending "Legitimate" Charities more money than she can really afford after they send her sob story emails. Because she has a record of supporting them in the past they won't let go. I'll never support a mainstream charity with an email operation again.
I used to collect these scam emails on my web site.
Every week or two, I will get an email asking if such and such email is true, or asking to verify a winning ticket, or contacting the Sultan of Brunei for charity or a project, ...etc..
The sad thing is that while some of these emails are from the USA and other developed countries, the vast majority are from desperate people in poor countries. Some of them already paid the scammers and believe the documents provided by them, such as lawyer and bank certificates with official stamps on them.
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Are they using ML/AI technologies to identify their victims?
Casteism