iWon has an article on what it’s actually like to be a Nigerian 419 scammer:
LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) – Day in, day out, a strapping, amiable 24-year-old who calls himself Kele B. heads to an Internet cafe, hunkers down at a computer and casts his net upon the cyber-waters.
Blithely oblivious to signs on the walls and desks warning of the penalties for Internet fraud, he has sent out tens of thousands of e-mails telling recipients they have won about $6.4 million in a bogus British government “Internet lottery.”
“Congratulation! You Are Our Lucky Winner!” it says.
So far, Kele says, he has had only one response. But he claims it paid off handsomely. An American took the bait, he says, and coughed up “fees” and “taxes” of more than $5,000, never to hear from Kele again.
Festac Town, a district of Lagos where the scammers ply their schemes, has become notorious for “419 scams,” named for the section of the Nigerian penal code that outlaws them.
In Festac Town, an entire community of scammers overnights on the Internet. By day they flaunt their smart clothes and cars and hang around the Internet cafes, trading stories about successful cons and near misses, and hatching new plots.
Festac Town is where communication specialists operating underground sell foreign telephone lines over which a scammer can purport to be calling from any city in the world. Here lurk master forgers and purveyors of such software as “e-mail extractors,” which can harvest e-mail addresses by the million.
Now, however, a 3-year-old crackdown is yielding results, Nigerian authorities say.
These guys have it good…..at least until they’re caught.
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