Nigerian Scam Messages: How do we know they're a scam?

Hello, and welcome to my latest blog specifically addressing Nigerian scam messages.

This scam has existed online for at least ten years now. (I'm writing this in May 2010.) For some reason, many, many recipients are still falling for these scams. They ignore all manner of common sense, and don't take any kind of due diligence regarding the details of the messages. They just assume they're for real, and another Nigerian (or other usually African country's) scammer engages them in an act of cheque fraud.

So how can an average, non-tech-savvy person tell that these messages are a scam?

This is a very common question, asked by thousands of recipients of these very common criminal messages. To those of us who have been researching these messages and the scammers behind them, it's baffling that anyone in their right mind could ever take these messages seriously, or believe that they were not a scam, but so many people still do that it appears a better way of getting the message across.

This blog will document randomly-selected "Nigerian Scam" or "419" spam messages, and apply a score based on reasonable common sense. As of this writing, that algorithm is yet to be decided upon, so for the first several messages, the score will be based purely on elements like:

- How do banks genuinely deal with accounts of a deceased person?
- Would a bank employee ever use a free-email service to perform legitimate bank business? (Hint: no they wouldn't)
- Do any of these lotteries exist? Microsoft Lottery? (no) Toyota Lottery? (no again) Yahoo / MSN lottery? (no again)
- Is any single word of these messages genuine? (That's the tricky part.)

If a message hits within a certain score, or in the early stages, passes a rigorous test of common sense, it can safely be considered to be very close to 100% scam, and should be completely ignored. Better yet: report the account the criminal was using to try to ensnare you into forking over your money. I've reported about how to do this on my other blog. (Read that posting here.)

I've been documenting and tabulating the money I would actually possess if any of the thousands of Nigerian scam messages were true. Of course none of them are. As of this writing, the total money I would actually have from these so-called lotteries, inheritances and funds transfers is well over $50 [b]B[/b]illion US dollars. That's [b]B[/b]illion with a bold, capital [b]B[/b], and that's after less than a year and a half of tabulation. On average I win or inherit $100 million US dollars every single day. There is never a day when I am not informed that I have won or inherited money from a complete stranger, always located in Nigeria or Ghana. It should be clear to anyone that there is no way on earth that this is possible. Absolutely no way. Yet people are still falling for these scams.

This scam has gone on for far too long and deserves to become extremely unprofitable for the criminals trying to dupe everybody into sending money to Nigeria.

Join me as I discover a proper scoring algorithm, and do some real digging into why these messages are so obviously fake, and why you should never, ever assume that someone you've never heard from really does have millions of dollars to send to you, out of the blue.

SiL / IKS / concerned citizen