advance fee scam Concepts

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It

by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris · 10 Jul 2023 · 338pp · 104,815 words

—like a deceptive study of dishonesty, a psychic who did not predict their own downfall, or an American who was scammed into helping run a “Nigerian prince” scam.22 Throughout the book, we draw upon classic and current research in cognitive psychology and the social sciences to explain why all of us are

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well-meaning, yet he fell hard for the scam. He was far from the only victim in the 2000s; according to the Dutch firm Ultrascan, advance-fee scams, of which the Nigerian prince is only one variety, collectively took in $9.3 billion in 2009 alone.7 Like savvy politicians, advance-fee fraudsters

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. Captain Mbote victim: M. Zuckoff, “The Perfect Mark,” New Yorker, May 15, 2006 [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/05/15/the-perfect-mark]. Advance fee fraud takings: “Advance-Fee Fraud Scams Rise Dramatically in 2009,” Ultrascan AGI [https://ultrascan-agi.com/Advance-fee%20Fraud%20Scams%20Rise%20Dramatically%20in%202009.html]. A more recent estimate suggests

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Still Rake in over $700,000 a Year—Here’s How to Protect Yourself,” CNBC, April 18, 2019 [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/nigerian-prince-scams-still-rake-in-over-700000-dollars-a-year.html]. We wrote an essay on the “Nigerian scam”: C. Chabris and D. Simons, “Why We Should

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in this section is adapted from that article. Most scammers are never caught or prosecuted, although an American who laundered money as part of a “Nigerian Prince” scam was indicted on 269 counts of various federal crimes in 2017. In a further irony, he apparently was lured into this role via a romance

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://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/us/nigerian-prince-fraud.html]; L. Vaas, “Your Nigerian Prince Is a 67 Year Old from Louisiana,” Naked Security, January 3, 2018 [https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/01/03/your-nigerian-prince-is-a-67-year-old-from-louisiana/]. A recent advance-fee fraud from the Netherlands appeals to nationalistic

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends

by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott and Nazneen S. Mayadas · 19 Jan 2010 · 492pp · 70,082 words

like drug and child abuse. Some immigrants have also been known to engage in crime such as armed robbery and fraud known as 419. The 419-fraud scheme is named after a Nigerian Decree No. 419, which deals with the eradication of fraud. Fraudsters from Nigeria have used various means to defraud

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fallen victim to the ploy and it is generally felt that Nigerian fraudsters have been operating across the West African subregion, including Ghana. A typical 419 fraud would involve an e-mail sent to an unsuspecting victim. The e-mail would relate a story to the effect that the person sending the

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cities of the world, constitutes a big headache to law enforcement agencies and the citizens alike, a serious crime issue for Nigeria has been the Advance Fee Scam, otherwise known as 419. This has drawn considerable adverse attention to the country, which has been making concerted efforts with foreign governments and agencies to

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expose the felons and their methods. The Advance Fee Scam seeks to take advantage of the greed or gullibility of foreigners, by usually promising them huge windfalls if they cooperate in bilking agencies of the

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government of sums sometimes running into millions of dollars. The Bureau of Public Enterprises (October 12, 2004) clarifies the operation of Advance Fee Scam and its practice to date, as: The Advance Fee Fraud is perpetrated by enticing the victim with a bogus business proposal, which promises millions of U.S. dollars as a reward. The

Engineering Security

by Peter Gutmann

of high-value items and trying to contact them at the same account name on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and other widely-used email providers for advance-fee scams and similar types of auction-related fraud. This type of fraud is quite effective because the contact appears to have come via the auction site

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

by Misha Glenny · 7 Apr 2008 · 487pp · 147,891 words

boasts low levels of violence. And they are correct. But there are exceptions. And because Bless Okereke was involved in what became the biggest single advance fee fraud (or 419 scam, as they are also known) in history, he was one of those exceptions—a bit player in a drama that, according to the exuberant

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grasp of the difference between reality and illusion. He was seemingly completely trapped by the addictive fear common to victims of the 419 or advance fee fraud. The 419 scam comes in many shapes and sizes—it sometimes arrives as an appeal to rich Westerners to come to the aid of an impoverished African child

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they transfer a facilitating fee of several thousand dollars to the bank’s “lawyer.” This is why the 419 scam (named after the relevant clause in Nigeria’s criminal code) is also dubbed the advance fee fraud. Once hooked, the mugu is asked for ever greater sums, lured on by the fictive promise of millions

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. “They wriggle like a fish on the end of a line,” concludes Mr. Lamorde. Ultrascan Advanced Global Investigations in the Netherlands, which specializes in uncovering 419 frauds, has reported that citizens in thirty-eight developed countries admitted to losses of more than $3 billion in 2005 alone. These estimates are necessarily low

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mounted, so did the compulsion to pay out more millions in the hope of retrieving the ever-greater sum invested. At some point in any 419 scam, the anxiety must mingle with a thickening despair that leads straight to a living hell. Sakaguchi’s response to this descent was to seek advice

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trousers that hug a sinewy body, Dede Mabiaku forcefully expresses the popular belief that “Europeans” are responsible for Nigeria’s ubiquitous corruption and specifically for 419 scams. “They invented the computer!” he explains. Dede is on his way to a party thrown by Hakim Belo Osagie, one of Nigeria’s most successful

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criminal threat that assumes several different forms. But the Igbo can stake a strong claim as trailblazers in this entirely new and lucrative genre—the 419 scam or advance fee fraud. For many Nigerians the degree to which their country has become associated with and even defined by the 419 culture is both a scandal

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and a disaster. But according to the musician Dede Mabiaku, the 419 scams were merely the diseased chickens of colonialism coming home to roost in Europe and the

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” is how Nuhu Ribadu described the ability of criminals to stall trial proceedings literally over decades. “We are yet to record one successful conviction for advance fee fraud [419] in Nigeria. Yet we have over two hundred Nigerians serving jail terms in more than fifteen countries abroad.” (The boss of the EFCC, the

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to facilitate cooperation between the criminal justice systems of two states, let alone four of five, as was the case in the world’s largest 419 scam. Chief Nwude and Mrs. Anajemba (her husband had been assassinated by now) were free to spend, spend, spend. “The problem is that nobody was looking

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able to afford it.” But that is one of the disheartening lessons of the Banco Noroeste scam. The tens of thousands of other victims of 419 scams have no such recourse to their funds. Global justice doesn’t come cheap. CHAPTER 9 Black and White Lucy Tshabalala found she could not move

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back

by Oliver Bullough · 5 Sep 2018 · 364pp · 112,681 words

, were devastated. ‘That was a lot of money,’ Ralph Sr told a local journalist. ‘We’re still paying the damgum thing back.’ It was an advanced fee fraud of elaborate brilliance. Even the location – Las Vegas – gave it the air of Ocean’s Eleven. Not only did S&N have no money, but

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wanted. For many Westerners, or at least any Westerner with an email account, the most prevalent manifestation of this kind of corruption was perhaps the advanced fee fraud. This kind of fraud – in which you are asked to give a little money up front, on expectation of a large pay-off which never

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to trust a Westerner with their crooked cash. Nigerian corruption was widely discussed; Western enabling was not. The unavoidable conclusion of the success of the 419 scams was that everyone who knew about Nigerian corruption also knew – if only subconsciously – about the Western enabling of that corruption: that the stolen money always

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Mohammed Abacha, two sons of the then-president of Nigeria (and of the woman who gained enduring fame in the most legendary of all the 419 scams), quite openly stated: ‘wealth comes from father who accumulated wealth as head of state of major oil producing country’. The 1996 file on Omar Bongo

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Abercia, Ralph 78–9 Abercia, Ralph Jr 78–9 Ablyazov, Mukhtar 165 Abramovich, Roman 235 Achebe, Chinua 123–5, 126 Adada, Loujain 158–9, 160 advanced fee fraud 128–9 Afanasiev, Dmitry 137 Afghanistan 9, 11, 12, 269, 270 Africa 47, 120, 123, 128 see also individual countries al-Juffali, Walid 157–60

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, Gerry 78–9 Florida 95, 226–30, 260–1 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (US) 111, 213 Formations House 77–84, 276 Forsyth, Frederick 118–19 419 scams 128–9 France 37, 114, 239, 271 Fraser, Ian 39–43 Freedom House 119 Frontline Club 171–2, 179, 188 Fukuyama, Francis 5, 128 Fyodorov

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property 10, 218–21, 224–6, 230–1, 269 New York Times 156 New Zealand 16, 92 Nigeria 10–11, 12, 270 Achebe 123–5 advanced fee fraud 128–9 asset recovery 10, 54–5, 182, 183, 184, 185 corruption 9, 86–7, 123–6, 128–30, 132, 269 Nisbett Invest SA 275

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile

by Alexander Davidson · 1 Apr 2008 · 368pp · 32,950 words

but will do little to protect the investors whose names and contact details are already in circulation amongst boiler room operators. Advanced fee frauds Away from investments, the boiler rooms specialise in the advance fee fraud, a spurious loan offer presented as conditional on payment of an upfront fee. There are variations on the theme but

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the outcome is always the same: the promoters take the fee but do not pay the loan. The 419 fraud is the best known type of

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Lilley’s. The author, an investigative journalist, gets under the skin of the anti-money-laundering bravado, demonstrating how ineffectual much of it is. Index 419 fraud 204 9/11 terrorist attacks 31, 218, 242, 243, 254, 257 Abbey National 22 ABN AMRO 103 accounting and governance 232–38 scandals 232 Accounting

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investors 113–14 transaction types derivatives 116–17 spot market 115–16 Foreign Exchange Joint Standing Committee 112 forward rate agreement 85 fraud 200–15 advanced fee frauds 204–05 boiler rooms 201–04 Regulation S 202 future regulation 215 identity theft 205–06 insurance fraud 206–08 see also anti-fraud agencies

Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner · 11 May 2014 · 240pp · 65,363 words

meetings; today it lives primarily on the Internet. The generic name for this crime is advance-fee fraud, but it is more commonly called the Nigerian letter fraud or 419 fraud, after a section of the Nigerian criminal code. While advance-fee fraud is practiced in many places, Nigeria seems to be its epicenter: more e-mail scams

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, 40, 69, 93 Abraham, story of, 187 Adam and Eve, story of, 187 adoptions, in Japan, 1n adults: dumbing down, 103 and magic, 102–3 advance-fee fraud, 156 advertising: awards programs as, 46–47 effectiveness of, 36–38 Africa: corruption in, 74 ethnic strife in, 74 independence in, 74 African-Americans, heart

Stealth of Nations

by Robert Neuwirth · 18 Oct 2011 · 340pp · 91,387 words

fellow browsers were carefully copying and pasting the same letter into hundreds of e-mails: they were the foot soldiers of Nigeria’s famous 419 Advance Fee Fraud (the name refers to section 419 of the Nigerian penal code, which deals with financial malfeasance), firing off e-mail scam letters that promise a

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.1–11.2 in food industry, 8.1, 8.2–8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 12.1 obstacles to, 11.1, 11.2 419 Advance Fee Fraud, 3.1, 10.1 Fox, Paul, 7.1 Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 12.1 France, System D

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

by Scott J. Shapiro · 523pp · 154,042 words

. When losses were substituted for gains, participants reversed course and became risk loving. Loss aversion shows why phishing emails that promise gains—such as the Nigerian Prince scams—are less effective than those that threaten losses—like the Fancy Bear security alert. Because human beings are normally risk averse, we are less likely

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to take a chance for a large gain if there is a significant chance of a loss as well. In the case of the Nigerian Prince scam, most people figure out that they need to risk money up front to get the reward. At that point, most back out. Indeed, some researchers

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett · 7 Feb 2017 · 573pp · 157,767 words

as people furnish their imaginations with all the information and use it to dream up variations. It is harder today to find “marks” for the Nigerian prince scam than it was twenty years ago, because it is so well-known that it can be a reliable topic for humor (Hurley, Dennett, and Adams

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–11 “new math,” 57 Newton, Isaac, 13, 398 Newyorkabot (thought experiment), 165, 400 New York Times, 36 niche construction, 260–61, 335 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 340 Nigerian prince scam, 312 noise: in information transmission, 108, 111, 124, 127–28, 136 in natural selection, 241 norms, normativity: reason-giving and, 41 reasons and, 42 social