If only those emails purporting to be from, say, the Nigerian Petroleum Consortium, eager to transfer money into our account, were true. Of course they're scams, and they continue to regularly ensnare a certain number of the gullible and the greedy.
It's called 419 (or advance fee) fraud after the code in Nigerian law that forbids it. Even so, it's a cottage industry, but so is a crop of scam-baiting sites, designed to annoy and waste the time of the crooks involved. The correspondence between the scammers and the scam-baiters makes for amusing reading. Here are three of them: 419 Eater, Must Destroy 419, and Scambuster 419.
written on Friday Oct 5, 2007
friend, can you help me deposit $44 million?
