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Comment by eaurouge | Hacker News Reader

You fly to Lagos with the willful intent to aid in the stealing of $1M from the Nigerian government and its people, but get beaten up instead. Your error, as you see it, is not that you were greedy and corrupt enough to steal other people's money. But that you were stupid enough to fall for the scam and have the tables turned on you. Interesting.

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Are we sure this isn't fiction? I'm caught between, "People can't actually be this stupid" and "At least one person has to have been this stupid, otherwise they would have stopped long ago."

Flying to Nigeria to do this is the most extreme I have ever heard of. I do know one or two people who have been duped by the Nigerian scam emails, but just into sending money.

This was back in 2003. Probably the scammers eventually realized that there's no need to have the person come to Nigeria to give cash when they could just wire it.

I think they still want people to come on the hope that they can hold them for ransom and make even more money.

I tend to think it's the right combination of down-on-your-luck, willful ignorance, naivete and social manipulation. I don't know that it's valuable to break it down to "stupid" or "not stupid".

Either way, this is kind of those whose validity seems like a coin toss. Might be true, might not be. I wouldn't be shocked, either way. Obviously the reach of spam schemes like this is frighteningly broad; you're bound to hit people who have the magic circumstances, though this one seems particularly extreme. I suppose it's illustrative, though. I approach a lot of neat stories I read on the internet that way.

I guess I always assumed must be grandma or grandpa on their first week of internet access.

Remember, this was a decade ago. What were you doing then? 419 scams weren't nearly as widely-known at the time. I'm not suggesting you would have been duped, but lots of normals had no idea about these criminials. For instance, spam filtering wasn't a common part of life for most consumers with a PC.

Even in 2003 I didn't think it was a good idea to conspire with unknown parties to commit bank fraud.

My mother first saw one of these scams in 2001. She laughed and said, "Yeah, right."

Yes, she is a "normal."

It's very real: http://www.419eater.com/

The letters are deliberately implausible to weed out smart people so the scammers don't waste time on them:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&o...

Personally, I want to know where all these dumb people are getting their money, and can I please have some too :(

In terms of the mechanics of what happened to him, that was error. Even considering morals, it was still an error (although the theft was arguably the larger one depending on how you feel about the Nigerian government)

"You can't con an honest John".

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