Last month I received a random email that was the equivalent of the hackneyed, ridiculed and scorned Nigerian letter. An overseas bank manager had US$31 million in an account belonging to his client who had died and had ‘almost’ the same name as me. The manager wanted to ensure I got the money.
Do such scams still work? Is there anyone abroad still naive enough to respond?
Scams, as old as mankind, are designed to misappropriate someone else’s property.
They are necessarily deceptive and are invariably manipulative and cruel, with sometimes devastating outcomes for the victims.
Having said that, the ingenuity, effort and cunning that go into the more sophisticated scams have an element of fascination for the idle bystander.
Often the amazement flowing from the revelation of a new scam is occasioned by the creativeness of the scam, but amazement is often accompanied by disbelief that it has caught so many victims.
Surely the Nigerian letter, or more recently, email, is a ploy now well past its use by date with an exceptionally low success rate.
The problem with scams and the reason for their prevalence is that they are highly variable (come in many forms) and usually designed for specific targets. They are often ingenious, developing over time or leading to reincarnations in different contexts (e.g. Ponzi schemes1).
So while the Nigerian letter scam now seems to most to be unoriginal and laughable, there are a myriad of other spawning scams constantly developing and evolving to catch the unwary.
Through our insolvency work, we often see the damage and downright misery that scams can cause to innocent victims.
Over the years we have reported several times in our newsletter “Sheridans’ View” on frauds and scams:
- Scammers and con artists warnings2
- Little Black Book of Scams3
- $93 million lost to scams4
- The Con Game5
- Pie in the Sky6
- Scams and swindlers7
- Scam warnings: old dogs with new tricks8
The latest scam alert I received was an email a few weeks ago from the ATO advising that AUSkeys have been fraudulently obtained to commit GST refund fraud.
And as I’ve been writing this article, I received an email about a package for me in Rome, Italy, awaiting pick up! If I give them sufficient details, and no doubt money, they will kindly send it to me. Apparently it is “a highly valuable delivery” and I “must attend to all messages without delay”.
So, can we beat the scams? Almost certainly not.
We can be better informed and educated, vigilant and protected with regulation and legislation. Which is all well and good, but scammers are usually either one step ahead of the rest of the community or sufficiently manipulative and creative that they will find a target. The rewards can be spectacularly lucrative and just too good for the successful brazen scammer to become extinct.
Articles in “Sheridans’ View”
1 The Ponzi Scheme – Issue 26: October 2013
2 Scammers and con artists warnings – Issue 36: September 2016
3 Little Black Book of Scams – Issue 28: March 2014
4 $93 million lost to scams – Issue 26: October 2013
5 The Con Game – Issue 26: October 2013
6 Pie in the Sky – Issue 18: December 2010
7 Scams and swindlers – Issue 9: June 2007
8 Scam warnings: old dogs with new tricks – Issue 7: June 2006