My New Friend – The Nigerian Scam Artist

Jump to Comments

It was at some point in the mid-Nineties, when my partner, Olda, and I were running a computer games importer in Prague that we got a letter from Nigeria.  We had never had a letter coming to us all the way from Nigeria before and so were rather curious.

Apparently, someone had gotten hold of several million dollars through some overpayment from a government contract and needed to park it someplace.  If we would be so kind as to do it on their behalf, we would get a nice chunk of the millions for our troubles.  All we had to do was send details of our bank account.

An interesting offer, certainly, but after 15 minutes of discussion, we thought it sounded a bit fishy, so we trashed it.  Every few months a different one would arrive.  Who would have thought that the Nigerian govenment could be so negligent with the money from their contracts?

With the advent of email, the trickle of offers to park vast sums of money in our bank account became a torrent.  Now it seems as if not only was the Nigerian government being negligent, but just about everyone in Africa was, as were many Russian oligarchs.

My spam filters started to get a litle bored of the emails after a while and started to trash them before I even had a chance to read them.  The Nigerians, still desperate to find a way of getting rid of their unclaimed millions started to get more inventive.  Now they were starting to force their money on me through internet dating sites and social networking sites as well.

But it seemed to happen less and less.  Surely, I thought, there can’t be anyone in the world stupid enough to fall for these scams any more and so the Nigerians must have gone off and found a new way of making some money?

Then, a week ago, I got a message come through on Skype in the middle of the night from a guy called ‘Gerald’.  No, not A Guy Called Gerald, the acid house DJ who had a hit in 1988 with his track Voodoo Ray that sounded like:

That would have been cool to have been Skyped by A Guy Called Gerald.  But I was just Skyped by a guy called ‘Gerald’ saying:

Hello,

Its  my pleasure to contact you in a very important matter of this nature, Could you chat with me for the details, If you are not online, then you have to communicate me via engraham124@yahoo.com

Thank you.

I thought that it was a bit strange to get a message through in the middle of the night, but sometimes I get clients contacting me via Skype to talk about business as my Skype address is on my business website.

I Skyped him back asking what he wanted (although I was already getting a bit suspicious).

He got back to me later in the afternoon.  He started off by making smalltalk.  Making smalltalk was interesting for me for the first six months that I was online (the second half of 1997).  In those days, I would speak to anyone about anything, first on NetMeeting and then on ICQ, still marvelling at the fact that I could be chatting with someone halfway round the world.

But there are only so many times you can get asked “where do you live?”, “what do you do?”, “how old are you?”, etc. before it all starts getting very repetitive.

So I asked ‘Graham’ what he wanted to speak me about as I was busy (which was not a lie).  He started going on about how he was living in Florida, dying of cancer, didn’t have long to live, the medications were expensive, he’d given most of his money to charity, blah, blah, blah. “OK,” I thought, “he just wants money.”

I told him (again truthfully) that I am currently in debt as a lot of people owe me a lot of money right now.  But he said that he didn’t want money, he had a “business proposal”.  He asked if he could email it to me.

“Fine,” I said (I get 400 pieces of spam a day so what’s another one?)

He did.  No surprises that my triple-spam-filters trashed it as soon as it arrived.

But I retrieved it, curious as to what it would say.  “How boring,” I thought as I scanned it in under ten seconds.  No originality at all – $9.6 million that he wants to donate to charity – can’t trust his family as they have already stolen his money once already - blah, blah, blah.  The only original bit was that he had attached a scan of ‘his’ passport as proof of identity.  So if a Mr Graham Bell of Florida is reading this, I suggest that you get yourself a new passport soon as your current one is all over the net.

Because I was a bit bored and feeling bloody-minded, I decided to see if my theory was correct.  So I just clicked on his message in Outlook, selected ‘View Headers’ and scrolled down until I found his IP Address.

I then just went to ip-to-location.com and typed it in.  Yup, sure enough, it gave his location as Nigeria.

I immediately typed back something subtle and predictable like “fuck off, you scamming Nigerian cunt,” but his part of the message was so spammy that my server wouldn’t even let it go through.

So then I hatched another plan.  I would see how much I could jerk him about – waste his time, messing him around with no intention of sending him a dime.

He got back to me on Skype the next afternoon.  Immediately I realized a major flaw in my ‘cunning plan’.  I am a really busy person and time is money, whereas he has bugger all to do all day apart from trying to scam people.

So I thought that I would just come clean and so I asked him how the weather was in Nigeria.

“I’m not in Nigeria.  I’m in Florida,” he replied.

“Well your IP address tells me that you’re in Nigeria,” I said.

“How can you tell?” he asked, obviously very surprised.

I explained how I did it.

“Are you a hacker?” he asked.

“No, I just know quite a bit about computers,” I replied.

“How can I stop people from finding out where I am?” he asked.

“You need to get yourself a proxy server in Florida.”

“How do I do that?”

“I don’t know enough about it,” I replied, quite honestly.  “I’m not a hacker.  I just know that’s how they do it.”

Realizing that the gig was up, ‘Graham’ came clean to me.  Yes, he was indeed in Nigeria, studying Economics at the University of Lagos.  He was just trying to make a few quick bucks like everyone else in the country.

There’s quite a lot that I want to ask ‘Graham’ about the life of a Nigerian scammer – I really am quite curious about the whole process.  Most of all I am amazed that there’s still anyone left in the world who could possibly fall for such a scam these days after they have been around so long.

But obviously they do. I am sure I read a while back that, in fact, they are so successful that these scams at one point accounted for something like 15% of Nigeria’s total GDP.  And Nigeria is a big country.  With oil. 

I also remember reading that Nigerians are supposed to be the happiest people in the world.  I wonder if the facts are connected?

A quick Google search revealed this interesting piece from Wikipedia that told me a lot such as the fact that they are known in the business as 419 scams after the section in Nigerian law that makes them illegal.

I hope to have some more conversations with ‘Graham’ in the future as I would really love to know more about the scamming business, but unfortunately he always seems to come online at exactly the worst possible time, when I’m at my busiest.

But I’ll let you know if I find anything else out interesting about him.

8 Comments

Filed under technology

Tags: 419, a guy called gerald, email, friend, internet, life, nigeria, nigerian, personal, scam, scams, skype, spam