Help Shut Down Stupid Nigerian Scammers This Holiday

As the Holidays approach, we spam investigators notice a very sharp increase in stupid Nigerian scams. This has been going on for several years now, but the volume for the last quarter of 2013 is significantly higher than previous years.

Based on anecdotal evidence from readers who contacted me specifically regarding the onslaught of Nigerian scam spam messages over the past three years, the volume of ridiculous Nigerian scam messages now outweighs all other spam messaging by a factor of anywhere from 3 to 1 to 8 to 1. One contact says he regularly sees (and reports) over 120 Nigerian scams every day. This is a ridiculous state of affairs of course. Scams might be more believable if a person received just one of them a month instead of one every 20 minutes, especially if the same scam wasn't repeated every single day. I have seen far more than 8 - 10 "Western Union" scam messages come through in a mere two hours. That's stupid. Nobody in their right mind would ever believe Western Union has 8 to 10 distinct "compensations" of millions of dollars each in a two hour period.

The problem, of course, is that while you (the reader of an anti-spam blog) and I will know well enough that these are obvious scams, there is a segment of the population that unfortunately isn't that bright, and they will believe they're actually talking to somebody from Western Union, or Robert Mueller from the FBI, or a representative of the UN, or the IMF, etc. etc. These are the ripe targets that the scammers are going after.

So in an attempt to spread a little Christmas preventive measures, I would like to submit that if you receive these scam messages, and they're high in volume, rather than "just deleting" them, or letting your spam filters capture and hide their messages (which they tend to do pretty easily since they're literally always the same message copy), instead consider reporting a percentage of them every day.

I created the Nigerian Scamerator™ several years ago and it is a very, very effective tool at shutting down scammer email accounts. You can download a copy here. I've also been in pretty regular contact with all of the abuse teams of every major free-email provider in the world regarding this abuse. All of the major email providers are pretty quick at shutting these offending accounts down, with special mention going to Hotmail and Gmail, who often shut the criminal accounts down within mere minutes of the report.

You'll be stopping criminals in their tracks, and stopping unwitting victims from ever starting the conversation with these moron criminals. It feels good!

Please think of the less knowledgable victims of Nigerian scams this holiday season. They aren't going to seek out an article like this, and they won't realize it's a scam. That doesn't mean they deserve to be scammed any more than you do.