E-mail scams rake in millions

By Karl Maier
Bloomberg News Service

TAMPA, Fla. — Shahla Ghasemi and her husband, Dr. Ali-Reza Ghasemi, were ready to believe it when a caller said someone from their native Iran had died in Nigeria and left them $27 million. It was only after they paid $400,000 in fees that the couple realized they had been swindled.

Messages proposing such offers, many of which originate in Nigeria, land each day in e-mail accounts from Hong Kong to Houston. They surged almost tenfold in 2001.

So-called Nigerian swindles are the No. 3 form of Internet fraud in the United States, according to the National Consumers League and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Last year, these scams cost U.S. victims as much as $250 million, Secret Service Special Agent Brian Marr said. Edward Venning, a spokesman for Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service, says victims in Britain lost $234 million.

"The con artists are very clever at pinpointing their victims' weak points," Venning said. "It's like any direct marketing thing: if it goes to the right person, you are likely to have a higher success rate."

The proliferation of the scams has prompted the Nigerian government, the U.S. Treasury, the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Britain police to establish special task forces to tackle Nigerian fraud.

The U.S. Secret Service receives 9,000 forwarded scam e-mails and 1,000 letters a month, Marr said. "The losses are escalating," he said. "With the advent of the Internet, a stroke of a key allows someone to send out hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, and someone is going to bite on this."

Known as 419 after the section of Nigeria's penal code that deals with fraud, these messages are typically marked CONFIDENTIAL and are allegedly written by officials of the Nigerian central bank and the state oil company.