Opinion/Editorial
THE WORLD’S SCAMMERS
The United States is under attack. The number of Nigerian scammers has multiplied by a factor of at least ten in the past few months. These scams are referred to as Nigerian 419s because most were assumed to come from that country and the numbers refer to the criminal code used to prosecute any caught in Nigeria (none). As it turns out, the majority of 419 scams come from coded, encrypted, or hidden I.P. addresses in the United States. England is number two, as a place of origin. Only about twenty percent of these torturously written complex operations actually come from Africa. If you haven’t seen one or heard about these scams, you soon will. What are they, and who are they? The scams are all variations of some very simple concepts. They offer you millions of dollars to accept even larger amounts to be transferred to an active bank account you might own. This version of the scam makes money by charging never-ending fees to assist in a transfer that will never happen. In another variation, they may offer to purchase something you are selling. They send a bogus cashier’s check for the item but send way too much money. They immediately correct their error and request a wire transfer of their funds back. Your wire is good (for the comfortably reduced amount). Their cashier’s check is not.
They might offer you a job as a secret shopper or writer working from home. They send you a large cashier’s check and then ask for some back for a variety of reasons. The variations on these three mentioned themes are nearly endless, and all of them require the cooperation of quite legal banks, financial houses, and money transfer offices around the world. Your own bank will participate in the scam, although it will always deny that. A regular citizen should not be put in a position to evaluate the credibility of a financial instrument. Your bank should serve as that entity, but that is not the way it is. There is simply no excuse, in today’s electronic world, for any instrument to take more than twenty-four hours to be declared valid.
Many of the scams depend upon cashier’s checks because so many Americans think cashier’s checks are secure and that the money backing the check is guaranteed by the institution generating that check. This is not true, and our banks do nothing to educate the public about their vaguely deliberate abetting of these scams. A cashier’s check that is bogus (the numbers on it are all phony although it has proper bank name and address data on it) will take almost two weeks to clear your account! Your bank, with a long relationship with you and your account, will give you full credit on the full amount in only a few days. They will not call the originating bank or credit union to see if the instrument is valid! The scammers know this and that is why they want their money sent by wire transfer, which is nearly immediate (it actually takes up to a full day many times). The transfer houses accepting the money for the scammers don’t care where it comes from and charge high fees in order to get their share and protect the scammer’s identities. There are over twenty of these small transfer offices for the scammers to use within one mile of Piccadilly Square in downtown London alone!
Your bank will do nothing to help you if you’ve been scammed. If you raise an issue about their willing participation, they will call the police (if you haven’t or won’t pay the money back to your account) and intimate that you may be part of the scam to steal money from them. The financial transfer houses the scammers use around the world will tell you nothing and most only have phone numbers answered for scammers calling in for their money. The police will take a report and do nothing. The FBI will do the same thing.
Our intelligence agencies, as well as our state department and FBI offices stationed abroad, should be killing these scammers off everywhere they raise their ugly heads (even though many scammers are right here they use foreign transfer offices to hide where the money is actually going). Our intelligence agencies don’t care in the slightest about protecting American citizens from this hugely successful kind of fraud. The Internet has opened up the door to this Pandora’s box because it costs nothing to send emails. The scammers have figured this out and send hundreds of thousands of messages every day. If you don’t respond they simply keep sending different variations until you do. They never go away.
What can you do if you’ve been scammed? Stop. Stop communicating.
The scammers want more. They always want more, and a mark (like you) that’s been taken once is easier to score from than a brand new one. You can laugh at the scammers and write funny stuff back to entertain yourself, but you are never going to get a dime. Scammers never wire money out to marks. They know the scam. The second thing you can do is accept money using PayPal. They won’t use PayPal because PayPal demands their money upfront. The third thing you can do is pay late. Really late. Don’t pay any bill due to any operation out of this country in less than 30 days, and don’t ship anything until that time has gone by either. The scammers want your money, but they’ll also take your art, cars, jewelry, and anything else you might think you are selling. Finally, never ever believe that someone who does not know you will give you anything for free.
You’ve lived your whole life understanding that so don’t let the persuasive ‘voices’ coming at you change what you know to be. You are not their ‘last hope’ for an operation, stolen money or their children’s ransom. Your accumulated wisdom and discipline are your lone defense out here in this area, as in so many other areas of life. Our government, in league with the U.N., could stop all this fraud (nearly instantly) but there is nothing in it for them. The African countries were the hotbed where these scams originated years ago. Don’t expect the people there to feel bad about it. They all live among the disappearing resources and assets we first-world countries are spiriting away. We’re leaving behind a lot of abject poverty and environmental debris. Out of such places come desperation, criminality, and fraud.
