‘Nigerian Prince’ Email Scammer Arrested in Louisiana | Hacker News Reader

‘Nigerian Prince’ Email Scammer Arrested in Louisiana

theroot.com

209 pointssrameshc103 comments

My mother's husband is a retired police officer who spent ~20 years working business-related crime, and he once told me that the "Nigerian Prince" scam even predates the Internet, it started out on Fax.

Some things, apparently, do not change. Or at least not very quickly.

It is kind of sad that there are people who are so gullible, but I wonder how one can live with oneself exploiting this gullibility.

I used to work for a trading company in Taiwan from 1993-94. We would get letters in the regular postal mail from African countries with similar pitches.

There is a really great documentary following an older man who constantly falls for 419 scams. Ultimately he is elderly but I think also suffered some brain damage. But just somehow not enough to lose his power of attorney. Frankly there are those people out there. It was a sad story.

It doesn't take brain damage. Everyone is very good at filtering information to match what they already believe. And once it becomes known you believe something, good grief you'll never back down.

but I wonder how one can live with oneself exploiting this gullibility.

I think it takes a sociopath to pull off this scam as a profession.

I suspect many of the young African men working these scams genuinely believe that the targeted Westerners have so much money that the scams won't seriously impact them. The wealth gap is enormous.

That person is safe from physical retribution, that's why. Fear of injury or death is the number one instinct involved as an inhibitor to deception and theft of someone else's resources. Fear of being personally branded untrustworthy is another inhibitor, that's been set aside in these kinds of fraud.

The law provides some safety for thieves, but technology provides the thief with additional safety from both the victim and authorities. The thief's family may have no idea he earns a living stealing; they may be poor and therefore stealing is morally justified. The balance of force, information, has been altered to thieves' advantage.

As far as what motivates them: top on the list is poverty, or more specifically wealth inequality; feeding a family is a top priority, poor alternative choices, and stealing with a technology providing anonymity seems easy, and safe, and they don't witness the fallout from their actions. None of the normal social inhibitors apply to these events.

And as for the gullible, well a lot has been written in HN about how technology fails the average non-tech person miserably and continuously and it needs to get better. But that's still just a side effect of wealth inequality and preserving that classism.

Yes, these scams existed already in the 1980s. Letters and faxes were sent from Africa mainly to businessmen and politicians. I guess they must have used national "Who's Who" type registries [1] to collect the targeted people.

The most prominent scam case I know is Olavi Mattila [2], a Finnish politician. He was Minister for Foreign Affairs as well as the chairman of one of the largest industrial companies in Finland. In the '90s, Mattila received Nigerian scam letters that convinced him to invest his fortune in the "investment opportunity".

Although initially he was the one scammed, he got so deep into trying to make it work that he spent other people's money too. Eventually he was convincted of fraud in 2004. (After the conviction, he apparently became a Jehovah's Witness. Interesting how that goes.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Who [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olavi_J._Mattila

That case made me quite concerned: our national wealth was actually managed by people who were as gullible as this. OK, he might have tried the old age defense: he was over 75 years old when he fell for the letter scam. And he was actually sidelined from state businesses already in 1981. But still, his arrogance was astonishing.

The Wikipedia link in [2] doesn't contain that tidbit about Nigerian scams, but a Hacker News comment is not a notable reference.

The Finnish language Wikipedia entry does include the mention of his fraud conviction and a link to a newspaper article from 2004:

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olavi_J._Mattila

It's a lot older than that; like 16th century. It's actually amazing how close the modern variants are to the original Spanish Prisoner scam.

Got any good examples of these early scams?

I'm not aware of any good centralized collection of them. But the articles written on the amazing durability of the scam usually include an example or two:

https://priceonomics.com/the-email-scam-with-centuries-of-hi... http://www.historyhouse.co.uk/articles/spanish_prisoner_swin... https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-9-lives-of-the-spa...

Wow, these are very similar to the 'modern' scam emails. Thanks for sharing this, I had no idea how old this scam was.

In the middle chivalry (loose rules of wars, feud and honor) required to spare the enemies that surrendered, but you could take them prisoners for ransoms. It was a totally normal means of financing warfare and profiting from conflicts. Knights were paid using land taxes (not enough) and from loots/randoms (potentially a lot if you were good at it).

I guess it was totally usual back then to expect a letter asking for a random for a nobleman to war. If the dude was dead and a the letter a fake, you had no way to know.

>I guess it was totally usual back then to expect a letter asking for a random for a nobleman to war.

So that's how random number generation worked in the days before computers! :p

Has father in law thought of writing his memoirs? Notable scams, unusual cases, devil-in-the-detail patient police work? Would find a market I'm sure

>Some things, apparently, do not change. Or at least not very quickly.

This is a feature, not a bug. The scammers are intelligent people well aware of the fact that "Nigerian Prince" scamming is a well known thing. They are counting on this to filter out the people who would waste their time.

I really like the Nigerian Prince writing style in the same way I admire a good stack smashing exploit. So I think high school writing teachers should assign these letters as reading/writing exercises the way a Berkeley 61C kind of class should assign stack smashing as a problem set.

You learn a little about style, voice and a convincing argument from these letters. Writing one forces you to step out of your self. It also inoculates you to a degree.

I have been known to reply to friends' emails in Nigerian Prince style. ALL CAPS. FULL STOP.

How about JEFFK style? I LIEK IT!!!111

Cast psychology aside and focus solely on the economic benefit.

$50 (18k NGN) is nothing to most Americans. However, 18k NGN is the current monthly national wage in Nigeria.

It costs little or nothing to blast Copy & paste emails to 1 million people using hacked / free SMTP servers.

Other factors to consider:

It requires so little skill that 14 year old kids do it.

Risk of getting cut is also super low. Police are on the look out for these scammers NOT to jail em but to collect their own share. They walk the scammers to the atm and take part or all of what they find there - usually, half.

Unemployment rate is 25.20% but this doesn't tell the full story.

Underemployment is another factor. As a result, many scammers are employed full time. The employment provides three benefits. 1. Free use of office computers and internet and most important electricity for scam. 2. A steady shock absorber income source for dry periods. 3. A camouflage to keep neighbors' tongues from wagging

I've rambled.

Scamming is so easy, has low risk, barrier to entry and high pay off.

One other point i failed to mentioned. If you live in SV, tech will rub on you. Same applies living in developing nations. Scam will rub on ya.

18K NGN is the minimum monthly wage. As some said down below, a lot of this scam don't originate from Nigeria.

> One other point i failed to mentioned. If you live in SV, tech will rub on you. Same applies living in developing nations. Scam will rub on ya.

This is assuming scamming is a national pastime in developing countries. Its not in Nigeria (as a percentage of 190 million population) and I assume most developing countries.

Nigerian scams are often Nigerian in name only. In the present case only some members of the team are from Nigeria.

There is a reason Nigeria is the country of choice and e-mails are so poorly written. First, it makes it obvious to those who know the trick, so that they don't call back and waste scammers time. Second, it gives a feeling of superiority to the mark.

Also, Nigerian scams are a tradition from long before the Internet age. Using Nigeria is like "foo" and "bar" in programming examples. Sort of.

> Police are on the look out for these scammers NOT to jail em but to collect their own share. They walk the scammers to the atm and take part or all of what they find there - usually, half.

Have a source for this..?

Related, Why do Nigerian Scammers Say they are from Nigeria?, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

To anyone interested in turning the tables on these scammers, I recommend this website: http://www.419eater.com

Dozens of hours of entertainment guaranteed.

I prefer Spamnesty, as it's fully automated. You just forward the spam to sp@mnesty.com, then watch the fun at http://spa.mnesty.com.

(http://www.mnesty.com is bogus business website with a tongue in cheek strapline.)

Somebody should strap on some machine learning to this. It would be so much more effective - and probably funnier! Spamnesty ICO / kickstarter maybe?

Dear Sir/Madam, I am an early adopter of bitcoins with 10000 bitcoins in my wallet...

why be so modest I am Satoshi Nakamoto creator of bitcoin

Actually, I might as well do an ICO. Does anyone know how to do one? I'm going to put various perks in, such as customized spam to all investors.

(I made Spamnesty)

> I AM ONLY BEGGING YOU WITH THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS

The site is a treasure trove.

This site is fantastic!

And don’t forget to check the bogus site. A “Maritime company strategically located in Mongolia”...

>Dozens of hours of entertainment guaranteed

I endorse that guarantee. This is one of the best sites ever.

Have been receiving emails from the prince since 1996. Never responded myself, but I'm familiar with a few who responded and were burnt.

Another class of scam that I've heard of frequently over the past few years is a job offer. Such offers typically offer more $ than Google/Facebook would offer but people still fall for those. They typically ask for money in order to process visa and other formalities.

There is a recent scam that targets those in the Dreamers program. A friend of mine recently received a very intimidating voicemail from someone claiming to be from the FBI. Shortly after an email followed.

He figured out it was a scam after he called back and caught the scammer off guard. Then we googled the email content and saw many people reporting the same scam.

Nigerian scam is nothing new; in fact it is based on "Spanish prisoner" scam scheme from 18th century.

It is interesting, however, how the new scams are created in the age of internet. The recent one is called "AirBnB scam".

Basically you flood a message board, such as Craiglist, with phony non-existing apartment rental offers by non-existing individuals for 60% of the market value. You blast New York Craigslist with beautiful photos of rentals at $650 when normal price for average spot is $1,500. Once a gullible person answers, you auto-reply to them via human looking response (bot in reality) that tells them the place has been rented but they should check AirBnB website where more are posted...

Its a classical scam of information phising with criminal conduct of false advertising (could be Federal offense if crosses state line) and few other statues. PG is very lucky they whole company is not facing jail time, but I think they stop it many years ago and usually statue of limitation is 5 years.

Here is more info on spammy history (including FBI most wanted list) of AirBNB founder, Mr. Blecharczyk.

http://gawker.com/5853754/the-seedy-spammy-past-of-airbnbs-c...

There is another scam where the attacker gains access to a business email account and then uses the existing relationship to trick the recipient into sending money to an alternate account.

The attacker waits for a legitimate invoice to go out, then follows that email with a forged email specially written to convince the recipient that the payment should be sent to another account.

They duplicate the name, style, and tone of the person sending the invoice by reading the archived email conversations so that they can sound more trustworthy when making an excuse for the payment change.

CEO fraud. Some companies have lost millions that way, including Ubiquiti.

India’s Vice President recently got scammed in a weight loss scheme.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/newsindia/when-vp-venkaiah-na...

That's quite similar to this story, the weight loss company was based in the US!

Also, for those thinking of skipping this article, the scam wasn't fake pills, but rather that the pills would not be shipped unless an additional payment was made.

Somehow it must be said that besides being "gullible" the victims of these scams are also (to a lesser or larger degree) affected/driven by greed.

They think that by sheer luck they are given the opportunity to make some (not so few) easy bucks for doing nothing or nearly nothing.

Yes, but many people are. Think about pyramid schemes or gambling as similar "greed" or a desire for easy money driving the victims.

They must, however, be protected from these scammers and shouldn't carry any blame.

We're talking about people who think they won the lottery without even buying a ticket. You say that these victims shouldn't carry any blame; at what point do you hold people responsible for their own actions?

A piece on New Yorker 11 years ago (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/05/15/the-perfect-ma...) on this kind of scam.

what a convenient post, I am getting some similar scam/spam straight from youtube https://imgur.com/1wD3bSP. why youtube allow people send external links using their email address and logo.

Apple allows the same thing: email appears to come from apple.com, has Apple and iTunes logos, and arrives in an icloud.com account. Why? It happens to my dad all too often and he's even clicked on the linked. He only became suspicious when it asked for his social security number.

This is not about being gullible. This is about phishing emails being just convincing enough, and the email and web browser eco system not taking the problem seriously enough. Apple certainly has the engineering expertise to prevent this particular instance on their end, but no one's ready to throw in the towel and embargo any email containing a user facing URL that differs from the underlying HTML link for that URL.

And remember, Phishing can be entirely prevented.

Just verify SPF, DKIM and DMARC headers and DNS records.

This will not save you unfortunately.

Sure, it will prevent the attacker from using realname.tld. But it won't stop an attacker from using real-name.tld, or realname.othertld. Or real.name.tld. Non technical people won't see, or don't know, the difference between the urls.

I've seen it hundreds of times, you tell people don't open the e-mail unless you're sure it's from name.tld. But people don't know the difference.

That's correct — but this way, you can ensure that if the email is from the real TLD, it is real. And that's a massive advantage over previous systems.

Sure, only cautious people, or tech people will take advantage, but it's better than nothing.

Actually I think it's worse, because it's just a variation on classism, but applied to the internet. Some people are being left behind to fend for themselves, the technology is in fact not egalitarian, it does not treat everyone equally (or neutrally if you will). And that is simply turning the internet into more of the "finders keepers losers weepers" we already have.

Classicism is something entirely different.

This is "people who have more knowledge will know more". Just like someone who learnt math in high and middle school will be able to budget better, and even improve their tax returns. This isn't classicism.

The screenshoted email in this thread may actually be really from YouTube. I'm not familiar with YouTube community features though, but it looks like a spammy channel invited the receiver to do something through the YouTube UI. If Google had a good way to prevent that, they probably wouldn't have spammy channels.

That said, even with dmarc and all, most email programs these days don't even show the domain name if there's a friendly name in the From field. Anyway, some people don't seem to notice that webmaster@johns-plumbing-blog.biz is sending them YouTube/eBay/whatever phishing links (even if the site in question never sends email like that), they just click through.

So if Apple applies those things to authentic emails from the iTunes store (receipts are the context in my dad's case), then how in the living goddamn fuck are Apple permitting obvious forgeries through to an icloud.com account? I find it really hard to believe they're either malicious or incompetent, so what's the alternative explanation?

I can't wait to hear how this American guy ended up working with the Nigerian scammers. Nothing in the online reporting so far. I like to imagine he was himself a victim and then impressed the scammers with his intelligence and ability to help them conduct further scams.

Often times, they are indeed victims themselves. When they've been wrung completely dry of literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and they are in such a deep hole they can't see a way out, the scammer will then ask them to assist in forwarding money. They are patsies, pure and simple.

Other times people will just be recruited for a work-from-home job as a "remailer", which again involves acting as a proxy for payments, cheques or physical goods and shipping them off to the scammer.

I can assure you of one thing. He didn't impress any scammers with his intelligence, the opposite in fact. They (the actual scammers) need people who do what they are told without questioning it too much.

The real scammers don't get arrested. Usually.

I believe your narrative; is there anything good published about that?

Possibly related, and enjoyable: https://www.amazon.com/Spam-Nation-Organized-Cybercrime_from...

These don't document nigerian prince scams, but they are close.

They're even targeting kids here in Britain. Gangs post pictures on social media of huge wads of cash, then tell the kids that all they need to do is move a bank transfer.

And suddenly you've duped a dopey 14-year-old into money laundering.

I'm assuming that he's a 67yo guy who is running out of money and doesn't want to be a homeless senior citizen, which occurs surprisingly often in the US. Desperation is a hell of a motivator, and I'm willing to predict that he uses a public defender.

I have a family friend who lost about $100k to this scam. She made a good amount of money writing books but lost a good chuck of it trying to "help out." I'm sure there are more people like him out there, but at least they are getting caught.

Wow. Busted on wire fraud and money laundering. This is the first I’ve heard of an arrest for this kind of scam. I always assumed it was too small time for law enforcement to bother with.

Gotta hand it to this guy. He hustled for his money.

I'm sort of sad about this. Him and I have had some fun conversations over the years.

So it's not a huge Nigerian business based out of Nigeria after all, huh???

FTA

> According to the Slidell Police Department, some of Neu’s co-conspirators actually do live in Nigeria. Neo was the middleman who sent the money to the real brains behind the operation.

419 scams began long before most people were using email. Around 27 years ago, my relatives in Texas sent us a tape of 60 Minutes when I was in Lagos, and in the opening monologue the person said "Nigeria is the most corrupt country I have ever reported on or from." Then they revealed lots of American businesses were scammed into thinking they were sending an initial round of money for valid business contracts with government or Nigerian companies. These scams have never been a large organized effort by one entity and the addition of email added in a whole new wave of scammers who enjoyed a lower barrier to entry since less overhead was needed and they could still enjoy enough successes with less sophistication. A lot of them are simply young unemployed guys killing time in internet cafes. In the late 90s the USPS and Secret Service both already had websites warning about 419 scams and although most people are only familiar with the cheesy emails, there is a history of massive amounts of dollars being siphoned out through a wide variety of storytelling by countless actors.

My understanding is that those young guys in internet cafes are not all just independently doing it, but are working a job doing it. Which I guess I actually did for a summer in Canada when for two weeks I sold magazine subscriptions that also awarded prizes when you subscribed (you never got them).

There was 2-3 people who actually ran the call center and made the real money. My friend worked there longer than me and he found out their names were pseudonyms. I think they eventually shuttered the call center and disappeared one day.

Besides the fact that Nigerian scammers often have middlemen in North American and Europe to assist the process, 419 scams have come to be commonly perpetuated from a number of other West African countries besides Nigeria.

I don't know about others here, the scam emails I get (and I get several per week) always claim to be from Burkina Faso, _never_ Nigeria. And it's been like that for years. In fact, despite being pretty good at geography, I can't recall what the capital of Nigeria is, but I can rattle off the capital of Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou) with ease, and even spell it correctly, just from seeing it in all these emails.

Goodnight sweet prince!

> Michael Neu, who is neither Nigerian nor a prince

Hold on ABC, we'll see what a jury of peers thinks of His Serenity.

He is white :)

And? There are folks with various skin colors around the world. The only thing your comment really illustrates is the stereotype you have of possible Nigeria-based scammers.

Why arrest them at all? They are so funny and ridiculous. Those whom they can scam are doomed anyway, the only way to possibly help them is to gain legal guardianship over them and filter their mail before it reaches them.

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