Nigerian scammer nets $40.5 million in 15 months

It seems that they work not only via the email lists, but also through craigslist.org.

Here is what happened. My wife was looking for an accounting position and saw a post in craigslist.org. She sent her resume and got the response below. Note: in the response below they are even offering a salary of $1800 per month. I was really confused by this and seemed shady so we didn't pursue, but just a warning to all the folks.

Company Name ; AXM GROUP LTD

Detailed Job Description – Accounting Assistant

The primary goal of the Accounting Assistant is to provide local customer support to our clients within North America. This includes providing convenient payment options and informing them of shipping and the terms of sale.

You will be assisting our clients within North America, the assistance to be provided will include: payment collections and customer service via email.

Your duties will include: - Collecting Local Payments When a buyer in the US decides to purchase an item through an online auction from our sellers he has the following payment options: pay pal, international wire transfer, international check, local certified check or local wire transfer. The quickest option of these is local wire transferring. Local wire transfers and certified checks are the options that the sales support representative will provide to the clients.

- Managing Data Along with the payments received from buyers you will be receiving details for these sales. These details will include items sold, price, and buyer's information. You are to file and maintain these purchasing records and transactions.

- Forwarding of the Payments Once you receive each payment you will be keeping 5% as commission and forwarding the rest to the seller or representative, whose information will be provided prior each transaction. It is crucial to complete forwarding of the payments in a time efficient manner.

- Correspondence You will be submitting brief reports, weekly reports, and monthly reports. Weekly and monthly reports are to be done in Excel format and are to summarize all transactions completed within the week, or month.

Here is an example of a brief report:

Date: August 2, '09 Buyer: John R. Smith Item: Jowissa Men's Watch Price: $ 1,921.27 Commission 5%: $96 Fees: $ 75 Total Forwarded: $1750.9 Forwarded to: Godwin Newton, Whitefield ,United Kingdom Reference Numbers: 23497839

- Fees, and Transferring Procedures All fees are covered by the company. The fees for transferring are simply deducted from the payments received. No client will contact you during initial stage of the trial period. After three weeks of the trial period you will begin to have contact with the buyers via email in regards to collection of the payments. For the first three weeks you will simply receive all of the transferring details, and payments, along with step by step guidance from your supervisor. You will be forwarding the received payments through wire service.

-Salary During the trial period, you will be paid 1,800USD per month while working on average 3hours per day, Monday-Friday, plus 5% commission from every payment received and forwarded. After the trial period your base pay salary will go up to 2,400USD per month, plus 5% commission.

-Taxes You will receive a monthly invoice stating your total income. All applicable taxes are covered by the company.

- To Apply Kindly fill out your personal information below for immediate consideration of this position so you can get started as soon as possible

Personal Information Full Name : Full Address: City: State: Zip/Postal code: Home phone : Cell phone: Recent occupation: Gender: Personal Email Address:

The employee,acknowledged the Trial and Detailed Job Description and signed _______________ (First Name and Last Name of Employee)

Oh, the title is pure guesswork. That big, big number is essentially pulled out of thin air.

Frighteningly, Macjon is merely one of about 100 modern-day 419ers plying the trade.

Seriously? This must be a much larger "industry"? Maybe the successful ones are that few, but there's got to be tens of thousands trying their hand at it at least?

He and the others buy American e-mail address lists from about a dozen U.S. based "lead sellers."

What? Do these companies operate in the open? I was under the impression that the botnet owners that do harvest email addresses were purely criminal organizations?

The U.S. Secret Service, which used to aggressively track Nigerian scammers, no longer updates its database of 419 scam letters as regularly, owing to budgetary constraints and manpower issues.

Or, perhaps, the explosion of the scam industry and the increased sophistication of the tools make it completely useless to keep a database of scam letters? I admit I'm not keeping up-to-date with email scams, the spamfilters are winning the fight for me, but it sounds like this article is horribly out of date or popularized, and if so, what's it doing on here?

Or am I wrong? Are there only actually a small number of email scammers in Nigeria? Do they get their email addresses from a handful of legit companies?

What can we take from the `success` of this guy and apply to our businesses?