When you receive an email from the nephew of Botswana's former Prime Minister saying that he is sitting on $30m and that half is yours if you provide your bank account details so that he can smuggle it out, don’t you sometimes want to say (to quote Woody Allen), to go forth and procreate, although not exactly in those terms? Or when a supposed English barrister asks, in broken English, for your bank account details to flick $20m that would otherwise go to the Crown on an intestacy.
These scams are known as advance fee frauds and also as 419 scams after the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code which deals with obtaining money by false pretences, Most of such scams have originated from Nigeria although scams are now originating from Russia and the Ukraine.
Sometimes a victim of the scam is contacted again by the scammers, this time posing as law enforcement officials offering to assist to get back the victim’s losses. The victim is then duped a second time.
There are people who scam the scammers. This is known as scam baiting or counterscamming. The purpose of scam baiting varies, from wasting the scammer's time and embarassing them to causing them to reveal incriminating information which can be passed on to legal authorities.
