Nigerian e-mail scam still collecting from its victims


BY HEINZREPORT
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST




The e-mail was titled "Help!"

"They say they're coming to meet me this Sunday at Pittsburgh airport with $38 million," it read. "I have contacted the FBI in Pittsburgh but they haven't responded back to me. I am very afraid. These people have my address."

Three more frantic e-mails hit my inbox within the next hour. Then the writer, a West Virginia woman named Janie, called me.

She got my name from the Internet, where she found the columns I've written in the past year about what's known as the Nigerian scam, sometimes also called 419 fraud after the section in the Nigerian criminal code that prohibits it.

I gave her some other law enforcement phone numbers and told her to tell the con men the next time they called that she was on to them.

Would-be victims like Janie are calling or e-mailing me almost weekly. Very often, they say, their calls to law enforcement were ignored because agents are too busy investigating terrorism.

One thing is clear: The Nigerian scam is totally out of control. Lately, I have received variations from the Philippines, Taiwan, Chile, Colombia and nearly a dozen different African nations from Angola to Zimbabwe. Most recently, an outfit calling itself the Euro Afro-American Sweepstake Lottery International in Dakar, Senegal, claimed that my e-mail address was attached to a ticket that just won a $500,000 lottery.

All the scams work the same way. You get an unsolicited e-mail from someone, often claiming to be a high-ranking government official or the relative of a president or prime minister or general. The writer claims to have a huge sum of money that he or she needs to get secretly out of the country. If you help, they say, you'll get millions in investment fees.

Subsequent letters string victims along. Some are asked to pay for airline tickets for couriers, to pay customs inspection fees and a wide variety of other ruses too numerous to list. I've interviewed people who've turned over hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One man called me from a hotel in Amsterdam just before Christmas. His wife back in America had found my column and alerted him two hours before he was to meet two Nigerians who'd taken him for $41,000.

Janie, the woman who called last week, thought she was going to help two Nigerians invest in gas stations in the U.S. and would get a several-million-dollar cut. She was too embarrassed to tell me how much she had sent the men through cashier's checks.

I told her that had she kept the meeting, she would have been shown a chest that looked like it contained millions in $100 bills stained black. The con men would have told her they did that to sneak the money through customs. Then they would have tried to collect $20,000 or $30,000 more for a special cleaning agent to remove the stains.

There have been 16 murders connected to the scam. Americans have disappeared, been kidnapped and killed after going to Nigeria to meet with their contacts or to try and recover lost money.

Nobody gets their money back. And although estimates differ about how much money people lose, the Secret Service says that every year, $100 million is lost to the scam in the U.S. alone.

Want to learn more? Visit the Web site of the 419 Coalition ( http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal). It's the most comprehensive site on the Nigerian scam, with reports and information going back for years.