Okay, I’m sure we’ve all heard about Nigerian email scams or 419 scams as they are also called. You get an email from someone you don’t know, usually in Africa (originally they were always from Nigeria but now people in other countries have picked up on it). This email usually has some long spiel with it but the crux is usually this: there’s a bank account in Africa with tons of money in it, usually multi-millions of dollars, and if you help them access it they will give you 50% of it etc., in other words a deal too good to be true. Of course to help them you have to send them some money first, for application expenses or whatever.
Anyone who send them money will never see a dime. Ever. And as for the bank account, they’ll keep stringing you along with expenses to squeeze more money out of you. Victims of this crime generally don’t come forward since they were technically helping someone commit fraud – they think they are assisting people to access a bank account that doesn’t belong to them in order to get millions.
There are other variants of this scam as well but basically you should never, ever, respond to any email that you weren’t expecting that was sent by someone that you don’t know. Never believe the tales of woe that these scammers spin. They’ve been doing this for years so they are very good at getting people to cough up some money (I saw one documentary that went to Nigeria and one of these scammers estimated that if someone replies to the email he has about a 70% success rate getting money). So just do not reply.
Now you might think “who falls for emails like that?” but millions of dollars is lost to these scammers every year. At one point there was an estimate that this scam was the 4th largest source of Nigeria’s foreign currency imports, but it has tapered off a little as people have gotten a little more savvy.
So why am I bringing this up? Due to a recent article in Australia. Here’s how bad it can be for victims of this crime:
“The biggest losses were incurred in the Nigerian investment scams, and only about 24 per cent of the people we contacted and told they were participating in this scam believed us," Supt Hay told reporters in Brisbane “So, 76 per cent continued to send millions of dollars after we told them they were participating in a scam."
So after the police track the victims down and told them it was a scam 76% continued to send the scammers money. They were so caught in the scammers web, so unwilling to admit that they had been duped, they kept chasing the dream. The human mind can be a very stubborn thing and unfortunately these people paid the price. Sometimes a true believer in something will continue to do so even if shown to be wrong.
This doesn’t happen just with Nigerian email scams but with other things as well; alternative medicine scammers thrive on this principle, as do cults, pseudoscience believers, doomsday prophets, conspiracy theorists; many reach a point where they have dug themselves in so deep that they can’t bear to admit that they were wrong, so they dig themselves in even further.
I remember being on the Bad Astronomy boards back in 2002-2003 where the fuss was this doomsday prophet predicting that some rogue planet would pass by Earth on May 15th 2003 causing mass tidal waves, earthquakes etc. A small number of people bought into this and started doing crazy things like selling their homes to move to ‘safe areas’ that this doomsday moron had said would be relatively safe from the disaster, there was even one report of a person killing their dog to spare them from the impending doom. No amount of common sense (things like “if this planet is going to hit us in a month why can’t we see it now?”) was convincing some of the diehard believers, who would instead find whatever piece of irrelevant evidence to shore up their beliefs.
So what happened after May 15th when nothing happened? Most of the believers saw the light, but many turned to the doomsday moron, who by this time had of course changed the date of our impeding doom - a common trend amongst doomsayers whose predictions don’t come true. I think that nut lost most of the followers by that time though. But there will always be another nut around the corner to ensnare the gullible.
Rant over. Please everyone, keep that adage “if it’s too good to be true . . . “ in mind with all of your dealings in life.
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