Slashdot Mirror
After a Decade, 77-Year-Old Gets Back $110,000 Lost In 'Nigerian Prince' Scam (kansascity.com)
Slashdot reader grep -v '.*' * shares a surprising story. The Kansas City Star profiles the victim of a three-year con that started with an email to a Yahoo inbox back in 2005.
A decade ago, Fred Haines was wandering the Wichita airport looking for a Nigerian man hauling two chests full of cash. After an hour of waiting and asking around, he finally came to the realization that the $65 million Nigerian fortune he thought he was inheriting was not coming after all. What is now coming, though, is the $110,000 he had been scammed out of, thanks to the work of the Kansas Attorney General's Office.
From 2005 to 2008, swindlers hoodwinked Haines, a self-employed handyman in Wichita, into spending thousands in pursuit of an imaginary inheritance from a Nigerian government official -- a con known as the Nigerian Prince Scam. Haines re-mortgaged his house three times in the process. Last year, in a settlement with the Department of Justice, Western Union admitted it knew some of its employees had conspired with scam artists to bilk people out of money and had failed to fix the problem. The company set aside $586 million to create a fund to refund victims across the U.S. and Canada... All victims who'd sent money to hucksters using the service were able to request refunds, but only those who had complained to law enforcement or Western Union were notified directly of the settlement.
"It got to the point where they were showing me that the president of Nigeria had sent me a letter. It had his picture on it and everything," Haines said. "I looked it up on the computer to see what the Nigerian president looked like, and it was him." Once, he received an email claiming to be from Robert Mueller, who was then the FBI director. The email was addressed to Haines, code-name "B-DOG," and it was signed with the FBI's address and official seal. "I wish you can remove doubt and suspicious and go ahead I assured you that you will never regret this fund release," the email said in part.
Haines is one of 344 victims who recovered a total of $1,758,988 through the Kansas Attorney General's office -- though when the office sent out 25,000 letters to possible scam victims, many of them were now skeptical of the promise of unclaimed money, and "Some were even angry when employees called to follow up on those who hadn't responded."
From 2005 to 2008, swindlers hoodwinked Haines, a self-employed handyman in Wichita, into spending thousands in pursuit of an imaginary inheritance from a Nigerian government official -- a con known as the Nigerian Prince Scam. Haines re-mortgaged his house three times in the process. Last year, in a settlement with the Department of Justice, Western Union admitted it knew some of its employees had conspired with scam artists to bilk people out of money and had failed to fix the problem. The company set aside $586 million to create a fund to refund victims across the U.S. and Canada... All victims who'd sent money to hucksters using the service were able to request refunds, but only those who had complained to law enforcement or Western Union were notified directly of the settlement.
"It got to the point where they were showing me that the president of Nigeria had sent me a letter. It had his picture on it and everything," Haines said. "I looked it up on the computer to see what the Nigerian president looked like, and it was him." Once, he received an email claiming to be from Robert Mueller, who was then the FBI director. The email was addressed to Haines, code-name "B-DOG," and it was signed with the FBI's address and official seal. "I wish you can remove doubt and suspicious and go ahead I assured you that you will never regret this fund release," the email said in part.
Haines is one of 344 victims who recovered a total of $1,758,988 through the Kansas Attorney General's office -- though when the office sent out 25,000 letters to possible scam victims, many of them were now skeptical of the promise of unclaimed money, and "Some were even angry when employees called to follow up on those who hadn't responded."
We from the and government were here to help!
;)
Is true at times!
Just my 2 cents
He was painfully stupid, gullible, and greedy.
what about the money he was promised.
The money wasn't recovered from the scammers it was paid back by Western Union, which means the real cost will inevitably be passed on to its other customers.
Doesn't falling for such an obvious con as this become self-inflicted at some point, even if some Western Union staff were duplicitous?
Although I hate to see anyone scammed out of their life savings, by saying that society will pay to bail out even obviously stupid/self-inflicted actions, is society really sending the right message, or is it just making more people comfortable with not taking responsibility for their own actions?
for these kinds of scams. The people fall for them are probably going to exist for a long, long time. Of course, the way you prevent this is to teach critical thinking (yes, it can be taught) and I'm not so sure the powers that be would want that taught. I know the current batch doesn't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hi, we're Western Union notifying you of possible relief. We understand you fell victim to a Nigerian Prince Scam.
We set aside USD$586,000,000 as a relief fund, and you can claim your portion of it.
Just send us a $1490 processing fee and we will process your loss.
"Western Union admitted it knew some of its employees had conspired with scam artists to bilk people"
;)
Just my 2 cents
We can call it the “Nigerian Prince Scam Scam”.
#DeleteChrome
Sadly, it is a known fact that the bullshit meter starts to fail in the elderly:
https://health.howstuffworks.c...
This is why they are preyed on by utter shitbags who are the real villains in this story.
The scammers who prey on our most vulnerable and the greedy idiots at WU who helped them should rot in jail in some third world shithole.,
Say what you want about how it's really their fault and they should have known better. If you're lucky you'll live to be 77+ and you can feel the pain of having earned wisdom only to have it fade away, to have contributed all your life and have it mean nothing. The lack of sympathy in this thread is appalling.
WU's primary business is transferring money. (Telegrams not much anymore). Their target market is people without bank accounts+credit cards , so not the most financially skilled population.
You have to admire the brilliance that is in this:
Haines is one of 344 victims who recovered a total of $1,758,988 through the Kansas Attorney General's office -- though when the office sent out 25,000 letters to possible scam victims, many of them were now skeptical of the promise of unclaimed money, and "Some were even angry when employees called to follow up on those who hadn't responded."
So their response to a scam in which people fall victim to receivein a claim that they have money waiting for them in the mail - is to send them a mail telling them that there is money waiting for them.
Someone had a very, very big glas of irony the day they decided that.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The last two places I worked, corporate security occasionally sent out a "phishing" or scam email. If you clicked the link in the email, you got a page about email scams. Open an attachment in one of the fake scams, the attachment was a reminder to not open attachments.
If, instead, you clicked the "report this email" button in Outlook, you got a message saying "congratulations, you didn't fall for the scam."
That seems to work. After the first few emails sent by corporate security, the number of people falling for it dropped significantly.
Interestingly, this didn't involve your boss or someone from corpsec saying anything to you. Just the questionable email had a link to a page saying you shouldn't have clicked it.
But in this case, the 'cost' will be a one time thing - not a marginal cost increase of the service. So if they increase the price, they will lose money since their market share will decrease - they will still need to pay the settlement amount regardless of the number of new services they sell.
My local supermarket had a Western Union poster on display at the customer service desk for years. Its background was a map of Africa with Nigeria highlighted, and it advertised a reduced rate on money transfers there. Now my area (Denver 'burbs) doesn't have any unusual concentration of Nigerian immigrants; their only possible reason for the offer was to get a piece of the action.
Incidentally, the poster pointed out in the fine print that the customer would get less than the going exchange rate by an undisclosed amount, so WU was proactively going for sloppy seconds.
We've had multiple economic crashes in the last 50 years that have hit blue collar workers hard. Combine that with the manufacturing base going overseas and these folks are trying to figure out what the hell to do in a country that abandoned them (much in the way you're abandoning them now). You've got guys in their 50s too young for Medicare with health problems that are going to kill them and their wives in the next 5 years. Then you've got these same guys being told Jesus loves them and will provide for them.
Screw Darwinism. You won't be claiming that in 10-20 years if your job gets offshored and you can't find another and you need a heart splint. You'll do whatever it takes to survive in the limits of your abilities. We're fucking human beings, not dogs. We don't need to eat each other when food gets scarce. We can figure out how to make enough for everyone. That's reason. Use yours. If not the wealthy will come for you in the next 20 years and you'll die just as horribly as the ones you're looking down on.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/