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As Holton reread the e-mail, his mind raced. After years of bad luck, he thought, good fortune had finally smiled on him. Within days, he was on the phone with Williams, recounting stories about his boyhood in rural Idaho. He was taken aback when Williams began to cry. "It was really moving," Holton says.Soon, a plan was hatched. Holton would fly to Johannesburg. He, Wil-liams and Williams's lawyer would visit the security firm, and Holton would pay $4,500 in "back rent" to release the $12.7 million. (The total due was $7,500, but Williams's lawyer had agreed to pay the remaining $3,000.) Next, Holton would open a new account in a South African bank, into which Williams's cash would be deposited. The money would then be moved into another account, this one in the United States. From there, Williams and Holton would split it up.
Borrowing the money he needed from wary friends -- all of whom demanded hefty interest -- and his less-skeptical girlfriend, Holton bought a $1,900 round-trip ticket to Johannesburg, and flew there on July 13. That day, Williams and a man he identified as his attorney, Charles Ngobe, picked him up at his hotel. Holton was impressed: "Ngobe was impeccably dressed in a business suit, and they were driving a Mercedes."
Birth of a Con
It hardly matters that Holton was hustled in South Africa or that Williams's tale originated in Zimbabwe. According to authorities, the con men who duped him were almost surely Nigerians. "It's frequently Nigerians operating in other countries," says Agent Johnson of the Secret Service. The FBI concurs: Nigerian criminal enterprises top its list of all African-based fraud, operating out of 80 countries across the globe.
The con goes back to at least the mid-1980s, when the U.S. Postal Service began seeing a surge in letters from Nigeria. The ploy was always the same: We want to hand you millions of dollars for just helping us -- at no cost to you. Once the hook was set, then came the add-ons: fees, bribes and worse.
The first wave of letters coincided with the collapse of Nigeria's oil industry, which left many of the country's highly educated, English-speaking work force suddenly unemployed. Throw in longstanding government corruption, and a new criminal element was born. Nigerian crooks, Agent Johnson says, are "a very creative lot. They've homed in on a topic, studied it well and gotten to be very good."
They are also technologically savvy. Almost as soon as fax machines became ubiquitous in this country, they began spitting out Nigerian letters. Even now, some offices receive several a day. And now the con men have added e-mail to their arsenal.
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