Interview With a Convicted 419 Scammer 184
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the i-am-the-prince-of-your-heart dept.
from the i-am-the-prince-of-your-heart dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Scam awareness website www.scam-detectives.co.uk has published a two part interview with convicted Nigerian 419 scammer, 'John.' 'John' talks about his experiences of scam victims, how he gains their trust and convinces them to part with their money, and how he would go back for another 'bite' after the original scam, posing as a law enforcement official who has apprehended the scammer and recovered the funds ... for a fee, of course."
Haha! (Score:5, Insightful)
When was the last time you had to pay the cops for a stolen wallet or purse that belonged to you?
Very clever. I mean only those foolish enough to fall for the first scam could possibly be foolish enough to fall for that line. "John" clearly knows his target audience.
Re:Haha! (Score:5, Insightful)
Once people like this find a mark, they will always keep coming back.
Re:Shock news! high income tempts youth into crime (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what the solution is, other than continuing to support anti-corruption movements within countries and provide any support to help governments clean up their acts. When the governments become less corrupt, everybody in the country wins.
Perspective anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although the story felt credible and added some insight into the scammers everyday life the story didn't provide any information. And in the end when the 'scammer' starts providing new information the 'journalist' get's angry and starts accusing him like a child.
What if the 'scammer' can feel better about himself after spreading information? I mean shouldn't people who have done bad things be allowed to make remorse and NOT have to feel guilty their whole lives???? I mean Jesus Christ.....
Re:Shock news! high income tempts youth into crime (Score:3, Insightful)
some folk are tempted into crime when they see their friends earning $4000 a month...
The causal relationship you imply here doesn't exist. It isn't inequality that's at fault, its these lads' greed coupled with lack of morals. I'm not tempted into crime where I see a Ferrari on the street -- and I would guess that the same is true for most folks.
Re:Haha! (Score:5, Insightful)
Throwing good money after bad is hardly limited to 419 victims. It's like an IT project that you've invested a ton of money in and isn't performing and you've thrown out your Indian outsourcing team but this new team claims they can salvage most of it for a little more money. And they end up paying and ultimately still scrapping the whole system because it's hopeless but nobody wanted to admit the money is really gone. That part is really just human.
Re:Haha! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's possible asking that question in Nigeria would get you a different answer than asking it in the US.
Re:Perspective anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree and also was disappointed that the second part of the interview was conducted the way it was. I noticed in one of the early comments to the second part that the interviewer admits to not being a professional journalist, and that he is human and his emotions got the best of him. That alleviated my disappointment a little... but it is still a shame that this opportunity was lost. It would be interesting if "John" has the courage to contact another organization that might be willing to interview him.
Re:Shock news! high income tempts youth into crime (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not tempted by the Ferrari because odds are, you can afford the transportation you need. OTOH, if you were living in the alley across from work because you couldn't afford a car or an apartment within reasonable transportation to work, you'd be a LOT more tempted, especially if the odds of being caught were next to nil. I'm not saying you'd take it, but you WOULD be more tempted.
If you grew up and lived in a society where the only people you ever knew who actually had their physical needs met were corrupt, you might never develop a proper sense of morals at all. Every life lesson would be that morals make you starve.
Re:what a crappy journalist (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the comments after part 2, the interviewer freely admits he is not a trained journalist. Blogger != journalist, no matter how many people tweet to the contrary.
Re:Shock news! high income tempts youth into crime (Score:5, Insightful)
But you can't deny that desperation can lead to crime. If the expected payout is $75K a year and I expect to make $2K a year at a legal job, that's $73,000 against the risk of getting caught. That's a choice between living in a shack, eating whatever you can afford that week, or having everything you ever dreamed. If you could find work making $10k a year, the difference then becomes being comfortable enough to raise a family without worying about your children starving or having everything you ever wanted.
I'm certainly not saying don't punish the criminals. If someone shoplifts bread because their child is starving I can understand that and defend that, these people make the local equivilent of a million dollars and do so year after year; they know what they're doing is wrong and there is no moral recourse for it, they deserve to be punished. But there is a cost (risk) and a benifit to doing crime, upping the risk of getting caught should be only one side of a two edged sword. Giving people legal opportunities to support their family and meet their dreams needs to be the other side of it.
There are far worse people, supposedly respectable (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is the general attitude in Nigeria. This scamming is like a national pastime.
What causes it I don't know, but I'd like to point out:
1. Being stupid is no justification for being ripped off, so please no moronic comments that those were were duped deserved it.
2. There are far far worse people around you, from your own country, that are ripping off you and many others for far greater amounts of money and/or doing far worse damage in other ways. An example is of course many politicians. But on the whole, the entire layer of top management and politicians who often end up in those positions, are causing much more harm and sucking huge amounts of money out of companies and healthcare too. Did you ever hear of a manager who performed badly, was fired and therefore got no further payments? No? I haven't either. They make a mess of things, then get fired and get a bonus or severance pay, whatever you want to call it, higher than the first prize in the national lottery here... If you're a lowly worker, you get fired and need to request unemployment benefits and start applying for jobs immediately. Why don't they need to?
These people keep getting such jobs, probably because of friends in boards of various companies. Or if not real friends, then it's done as a mutual favour: I help you and in the future you will help me. Which is essentially what 'networking' is all about, i.e. a form of cronyism.
Another example I recently encountered made me think that there are lawyers who have found the perfect legal scam. The example I'm giving here is Pieter Lakeman, who set up a foundation "stichting DSB leed" for supposed victims of bad mortgages given out by the BSD bank. What is going on is as follows: He identified that there might be some bad loans, badly given advice, then extrapolates this to almost all loans, sets up this foundation, from which you can get help for a small amount of money, sa 50 euro. Now there's no guarantee that your loan is bad/badly done or you were given wrong information by the bank, so this foundation can 'check' loans, say "nothing we can do" and they don't need to pay back any money of that. I read that he and another guy who set up this foundation gave themselves a salary of 300 euro per hour...
That's a nice way of getting yourself self-employed at stratosphere salaries.
This asshole then proceeds to put the word out that people should remove money from DSB and in the end it goes bankrupt because of this (and because the finance minister doesn't want to help. Eh, why not after the billions of loans to other banks? Why indeed...)
It turns out, as checks after this bankruptcy have shown, that very few loans were bad (inappropriate, or given with bad advice etc.).
He has not only caused a great amount of damage, he's also legally scammed almost all the people who paid money for that 'review of their loan'.
It's a fantastic scam: You identify something that might be wrong somewhere, then set up a foundation, which people can become a member of or have something checked out by, for a relatively small amount, such that you wouldn't go to court over it... Then you just check loans or whatever that foundation would do, at 300 euro an hour (i.e. 10 minutes per loan in this case) and of course find nothing wrong or say "it will be included in the legal action". In the end nothing happens, and in this case, making the bank go bankrupt is a pretty good way to say you can't do anything any more as the executors now say what will happen with assets/loans etc.
I have suggestion for another ruthless lawyer: Set up a foundation to counter the scam of Lakeman. Charge 15 euro per case, then of course in the end you say after studying the foundation's charter that there's nothing you can do...
Re:Shock news! high income tempts youth into crime (Score:1, Insightful)
Frankly, I find your "lack of morals" comment appallingly ignorant: the fact that you are posting on slashdot means you have no idea what it's like to live in poverty. Let's throw out the Ferraris completely, and pretend you saw a loaf of bread on the street. Now imagine you and your family had no bread. Would you then be tempted to take the bread? Would this be solely driven by greed and a lack of morals?
Let me guess, you would "get a job" and "work hard" to support your family, not steal. Well, what if there were no jobs? What if the only job was to work for a scammer? You work for the scammer, and you start earning money and then you get sucked in by greed and corruption. But it doesn't start out like that. It's time people started looking at the deeper roots of poverty and its consequences (Nigerian scammers). Are you willing to say its greed and immorality? Because I'm not.
Re:Shock news! high income tempts youth into crime (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not tempted into crime where I see a Ferrari on the street -- and I would guess that the same is true for most folks.
Which is why most folks don't own Ferraris, and most Ferrari owners have some pretty questionable behaviour in their past. You don't get that kind of money without doing something pretty slimey for a living, like being a bank executive or otherwise participating in the amoral circus that is the American financial system.
An Excellent Start (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Haha! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Perspective anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
It showed to me that the person writing the article was using the "journalist" as a device to get pre-ordained responses from the "repentant scammer".
Re:Shock news! high income tempts youth into crime (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, seriously?
How do this get modded up? It seems like the only kind of people that you can stereotype and prejudice safely are the rich. "Most" people that I know who own expensive cars or boats are amongst the nicest and most moral people I know. Not everything is like television or the movies.
I am not saying that you are incorrect, by your definitions of moral and good and nice. But I would like to hear what your workers think of you. Their needs and concerns are probably quite different from yours, and you may not even realize it.
Re:Haha! (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me see if I understand.
Policemen are crooks. They will steal your stuff with impunity because the worst thing that will happen to them -- and only if you have extensive photo evidence -- is that they will have to return it.
In a normal country, heads would have rolled regardless. And by "heads rolling" I mean criminal prosecution, jail time and finally getting fired and losing all benefits, not some "suspension with pay" bullshit.
Unfortunately, I do not think that there is such a thing as a "normal country" anymore.