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Last weekend a cousin wrote asking my advice about an email she’d received that told of someone dying in a third-world country and wanting help to get their large sum of money out. I recognized it instantly for the classic “Nigerian Scam” email. In fact, I was surprised that this was the first time she’d run into that. Naturally, I wrote urging her to DELETE and to avoid those sob stories at all costs.

She wrote back that I need to warn people. Well, I’ve been aware of these and have deleted many of those emails over the last seven + years, but maybe I’m assuming too lightly that since I know about them, everyone else does too. So I’m posting a warning today!

As authentic as they may sound, and no matter what nationality they are, or whether they write that they are Christians, and are appealing to you as a Christian to help, please do not fall for that! The names they use in their emails are made up, no matter how original they seem.

The name, Nigerian Scam, comes from the fact that these used to first come from there. Now it just refers to any scam that uses this modus operandi. It is usually the wife of some important government official or doctor in a third world country. Her husband has been killed for all he knew or did (sometimes good and sometimes bad), and now that she’s dying, without heirs, she wants to get this “wealth” out of that country and give it to people who will use it wisely. She needs your bank account number (WARNING!!) to transfer it to you.

If you respond with your account info, they have all they need to break into it, and clean you out of all your savings!

This is run by a very organized crime syndicate that uses carefully honed stories, some with deliberate misspellings to look like they come from a truly desperate third-world country. The Canadian RCMP have done some thorough investigations, and find that these people move their base of operations often, so that just when they have about traced them to a location, the scoundrels have moved to another city. The advent of the internet means they can operate from Montreal or Amsterdam or Rome, or Timbuctu, and any place in between. Any place they can connect to the net is good enough. If the police don’t seem to be aware of them, so much the better for them.

Apparently they love to work with people from my province, Saskatchewan, because we have a reputation for being tenderhearted and helpful. From time to time we get RCMP warnings on the radio, to refuse to give out our bank account information to strangers. They have really SAD stories of people in our province who have tried to help these strangers, and been robbed of all their life’s savings.

Just stop and think - why would someone like that write to you, not knowing or using your real name, and offer to entrust their illgotten wealth into your bank account? Doesn’t that smell the least bit foul to you? Terribly foolish, at least, right?

And how do you get on their mailing list then? If you have put your email address on a web page, or in a guestbook on someone’s site, or in a forum, or countless other places, they have robots that roam around day-and-night to harvest those email addresses and add them to their database. Besides that, they have robots that can scramble and present millions of combinations for usernames for common email hosts, such as hotmail, yahoo, aol, etc. They don’t mind sending out millions of emails in the hopes that just one or two will match someone’s real username. One sucker who gives them their bank info can help them more than cover their costs. Many times over!

So what can you do? If you have nothing else to do, you could forward all such emails to the nearest police department, after you determine whether they are still collecting clues, or have given up. If you’re busy, learn to recognize the pattern to their emails, and delete them as soon as you see the subject line. Don’t even bother to read the sob story.

If you know someone who is just starting on the internet and hasn’t seen or heard of the Nigerian Scam yet, inform them.

You can also do your own more thorough research by entering “Nigerian scam” into Google or some other search engine. You will will get quite an eye-opener! I just did that and from four pages learned a lot more than I already knew!