Who falls for this stuff?

By Don Oldenburg
THE WASHINGTON POST

 

Monday, June 5, 2006
All sorts of people, even smart ones, fall for Web scams


Who falls for this stuff?

Who's so greedy or naive to get suckered by those Nigerian scams that litter inboxes and spam filters with rubbish so clearly a ruse that you would have to be a knucklehead or on drugs not just to delete 'em?


That's the question people ask. Readers raise it all the time. Whenever the column or talk turns to swindles and the Nigerian e-mail nonsense in particular, they want to know: Who could possibly fall for this?


You might be surprised.

Sami Klein received an e-mail a few months ago from someone named "Susan Bryant," purportedly an art dealer in London who needed a representative in the United States to "facilitate money exchanges" with her U.S. customers. Something about Americans who buy her artwork always paying with money orders that are difficult to cash in London.


Thinking it was legit, and maybe an interesting opportunity, Klein replied with her name and address as requested.

"I didn't worry about sending it to her," says Klein, 66, a retired science librarian from Columbia, Md., who knows better than to give out her Social-Security number, credit-card and banking information to strangers but figured that sending her name and address wouldn't hurt.


A week later, Klein received an envelope containing five Wal-Mart money orders made out to her, each for $925. As instructed, she cashed the money at her bank, kept 10 percent and wired the remainder by Western Union to "Bryant's" husband, who just happened to be in Nigeria collecting wood for art work.


"I never knew that money orders could be recalled, but that is what happened," says Klein, whose bank deducted the $4,000 she wired to Nigeria from her own funds. Never mind the $462 commission she thought she earned - that was as bogus as the counterfeit Wal-Mart money orders.


But that didn't end the scam. Even as Klein was making out the police report and putting her bank on notice, she was still receiving e-mails from Bryant prepping her for more transactions. She messaged back that she wanted the $4,000 restored to her account and wasn't doing any more work until it was.


Bryant sent an apologizing e-mail to Klein, filled with lousy grammar and misspellings, blaming the "delay" on the U.S. customer. She promised to wire 20 percent commissions directly to a Wells Fargo bank account for Klein's future help. Oh, and she said she would happily instruct Klein how to open that account.


Klein declined. "I could be a sucker once, but I'm not stupid," she says. "Lesson learned."

Look, Klein doesn't qualify as a greedy or naive person. Other than being retired, she's not standard scam-victim material. She has traveled the world and lived in Japan, Italy and Malta. Since retiring, she has stayed active - she gardens, reads extensively, does computer-database work, knits hats for cancer patients and even serves as president of her temple. If she could fall for it, so could lots of people. And they do.


Last March, it was Louis A. Gottschalk, the respected founding chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of California at Irvine. He wired $3 million to Nigeria. In April, there was an Idaho financial planner. Last year, a Los Angeles record producer. How about the Massachusetts psychotherapist profiled in The New Yorker this month?


"There are some highly educated people who for whatever reasons fall victim to this," says Tom Mazur, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service, which investigates such scams. "I don't know their motivation for getting pulled into one of these schemes. Certainly these types of criminals prey on the emotions and on people's sympathies sometimes. But somewhere in the back of their minds, the victim's got to be thinking about getting rich quick."


Nigerian fraud scams (aka "419 scams" after the Nigerian penal code addressing fraud) have been around since the '70s when money was swindled the old-fashioned way - con artists had to lick stamps and send letters. The Internet changed all that, making it easy to spam millions of potential victims with classic 419 scam e-mails, purportedly from the daughter of a deposed African dictator or a former finance minister of an African nation who wants your help in transferring millions of dollars to the United States - and promises a tasty percentage for your help.


Too absurd to work? Ultrascan Advanced Global Investigations, a Dutch private-investigation company that has been studying 419 scams worldwide for 10 years, released its latest damage estimates in March. Companies and individuals in the United States were scammed for $720 million in losses in 2005, it estimates. Total losses from 37 nations to these scams is almost $3.2 billion. The United Kingdom has the second-highest losses at $520 million, and Spain and Japan tied for third at $320 million in losses.


Tens of thousands of victims worldwide fall victim to the scams each year - and although the losses to each victim are decreasing because of more scammers working the lower-amount swindles (like phony money orders, lottery fraud and auction-overpayment schemes), the number of victims is increasing, UAGI reports on its Web site. The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) estimates that, based on complaints it received, the average loss to a 419 swindle last year was $5,000. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Internet-related fraud complaints involving a "wire transfer" of money as the payment method - typical of 419 scams - more than tripled from 2004 and 2005.


Mazur says that since the explosion of the Internet, these criminals can spam a whole group of individuals and gain wide access to an unsuspecting public. "If they put out 100,000 e-mails and two people bite," he says, "it would be a successful day."


Adding to the success of these scams is the number of sophisticated variations. The "London art dealer" ploy in Klein's case was a relatively new twist that started showing up in January. In August last year, the 419 scammers stooped so low as to take advantage of the London terrorist bombings, informing e-mail recipients that they had been left money by a victim.

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Edit:  Posted on August 20, 2006 at 07:38:57 PM
by Hannah beach_saint@yahoo.com

I haven't fallen for it...but I'm being set up. I have been corresponding with a "London art dealer" who found me on match.com.
The photo he sent reveals an amazingly handsome man. His IMs and emails are tasteful, even if the English is poor. He says he is Greek and has only been in London when his father died and he took over the business in 1997. Of course, he could be legitimate and being set up by criminals in Nigeria where he says he is now on business. My big surprise came yesterday when he said he was coming here directly from his Nigerian buying trip. At first I said, yes, then I started to read about these scams, and so I told him not to come. I haven't heard from him since. What a surprise!

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