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In June 2002, Don Holton, a musician in Boise, Idaho, received what he quickly decided was his big break. It came in the form of an unsolicited e-mail from a stranger named Richard Williams.
"It might be a surprise to you where I got your contact address," Holton's mysterious correspondent began. "I got your e-mail address from the Internet, please don't be worried." What followed were four badly written paragraphs that held the promise of easy money. Williams explained he was "the elder son of Mr. Parker Williams of Zimbabwe," and during that country's "current crisis" supporters of the president had "invaded my father's farm burnt down everything, killed him and confiscated all his investments." After that, Williams wrote, "my mother and I with my younger brother decided to move out of Zimbabwe for the safety of our lives." They fled to South Africa, taking "the money my father kept in the safe in my mother's house which amounted to the sum of US$12.7 Million United States Dollars." The cash was "in the secret vaults of a private security firm."
Now, Williams wrote, "myself and my mother have decided to contact any reliable overseas firm/person who could assist us to transfer this money out of The Republic of South Africa." The reason? "We as asylum seeker here in South Africa cannot open a non-resident account through which this fund will be channeled out to your nominated overseas account." If Holton would help, he'd get $2.53 million.
The message closed this way: "This transaction is 100% risk free."
Hooking the Hungry Fish
Don Holton didn't know it -- or, more likely, he refused to recognize it -- but he was about to fall prey to one of the boldest and most pervasive scams on the planet -- the so-called Nigerian Letter Fraud, also known as a "419 Fraud" (for the section of the Nigerian penal code that covers such scams).
If the e-mail he received sounds at all familiar, you or someone you know is likely among the legion of Americans to get such a proposition via e-mail or fax over the past two decades. Amazingly, after so many years, the Nigerian letters just keep coming. Even more amazingly, people still bite.
Common sense prompts most recipients to simply trash these come-ons. But for every thousand messages Nigerian tricksters send, authorities say, an average of one to three people respond, driven by greed, desperation or naiveté. The result is a scam that ranks among Nigeria's top industries and that, according to conservative estimates, continues to siphon well over $100 million a year out of the United States. "If you throw your hook into water filled with fish, and there are hungry fish out there," says Paul Johnson, assistant special agent in charge of the Criminal Investigative Division at Secret Service Headquarters in Washington, D.C., "eventually, you're going to hook something."
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