“Very urgent notice!
This letter is officially to inform you that we have verified your inheritance file this year and found out that the reason why you have not received your payment is because you have not fulfilled the obligations given to you in respect of your inheritance payment.
We have arranged your payment through our swift card payment center, which is the latest instruction by the president and commander in chief of armed forces, Federal Republic of Nigeria and Senate committee members on finance. This card center will send you an ATM card which you will use to withdraw your money in any ATM machine in any part of the world, but the maximum is seven thousand five hundred dollars per day.”
I hope above mentioned paragraphs make sense to you as many of us have seen emails like this. These are known as “419” or Nigerian advance fee scammers hoodwinked more than nine billion dollars from consumers in 2009. The real shocking news is that this figure is equivalent to 4% of Nigeria’s GDP (Gross domestic product).
These numbers are provided by Dutch investigation firm “Ultrascan”, which has been monitoring these scams since 1996. Even with the shocking figure of 250,000 individual scam artists all 8,503 cases didn’t come from Nigeria. It involves people from 152 countries around the globe, keen to get chunks of the free money.
People should have been aware of these types of scams by now but seems like they haven’t. Amount lost in 2008 ($6.3 billion) was less than the amount lost in 2009 ($9.4 billion) which clearly shows the negligence of people.
The question is why this problem continues?
One of the reasons is human greed and people fell for these type of offers, doesn’t matter how illogical/ nonsensical they might seem.
These scammers work without a fear of penalty and it seems like law enforcement have no control over them.
But a larger issue is likely that law enforcement seems to have absolutely no control over these scammers, and they operate virtually without penalty. Crime is widespread due to the relaxed law in Nigeria, thus making it very difficult for the international agencies to deal with them.
