Posted on 10/28/2002 2:51:42 PM PST by ex-Texan
E-mail Scam to Launder Money Lures Many
10/28/02
JOHN SNELL
Jane was a world-class chump, and she knows it.
The Salem-area woman lost nearly everything in an international e-mail scam: her well-paying state job, her retirement savings and 17 years of hard-earned house payments. All to scrape together more than $70,000 she would give to African strangers who promised to make her wickedly rich.
When the swindle began in March 2000, Jane figured her lucky day had arrived. In a way, it had.
She's lucky she wasn't killed.
The Oregonian is withholding Jane's real name because she is afraid the scammers will track her down and hurt her -- a concern confirmed by the U.S. Secret Service and the Oregon Justice Department.
She is one of thousands of Americans who have been taken in by the fraud, which offers to pay people millions for their help in moving money out of Africa.
Authorities aren't sure how many of the victims are from Oregon because most are too embarrassed to report it. But state officials say dozens of Oregon victims have come forward and there certainly are more.
"Greed is, of course, by far their biggest motivation," said Jan Margosian of the Oregon attorney general's office. "They want you to launder money for them. It's pretty hard for you to not know that. It's just regular folks who are getting drawn into this."
Margosian said the scam claims "a wide range of victims, from folks in their 20s to folks in their 80s. It's almost a cottage industry."
A plea, a trip, then trouble The fraud is called the "419" scheme. Anyone with an e-mail address likely has seen it.
While there are minor variations among the pitches, at their core they are the same.
In broken, often sheepish English, the writer claims to be from Africa, most often from Nigeria, Zimbabwe or South Africa.
The writer is desperate to move large amounts of money out of the country and into a foreign bank. Targets of the shakedown are told they can keep a share of the money in exchange for their help. The cut is usually around a fourth of the total, making for a multimillion-dollar payoff.
"In most of these things, you're going to be encouraged to travel overseas to complete the transaction," said Brian Marr, special agent with the U.S. Secret Service in Washington, D.C. "That's when the trouble is going to start."
In July, according to the Times of London, a former mayor of Northampton fell for the scheme and was held with a gun to his head in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was rescued in an international police effort.
In 1999, Romanian businessman Danut Mircea Tetrescu fell for the pitch, flew to Africa and was held for ransom. The same year, Norwegian millionaire Kjetil Moe was lured to South Africa and killed.
Nearly everyone dismisses the 419 proposal as a sham. But not all have such insight.
Little more than a year ago, a Portland dentist lost as much as $100,000. The man, who doesn't want his name published, received the e-mail appeal and sent the scammers his debit card number. Days later, Margosian said, his bank account was drained.
Two years ago, elected officials of a small Southern Oregon community booked a flight to Africa thinking the promised payoff would cure the town's financial ills.
"They were on their way to Nigeria," Margosian said. "Their travel agent was just chitchatting with one of the people."
The official confided what they were about to do.
"The travel agent said, 'You guys are idiots. You could lose all the town's money and get killed.' "
They never made the trip. Margosian said they didn't want their names made known, either, or their town identified.
A new delivery vehicle The scheme gets its name from Article 419 of the Nigerian Penal Code, which outlaws it. The scam is also known as the "Nigerian letter" or "the advance fee fraud."
Call it what you will, the ruse is more than 20 years old, starting as a chain letter in the 1980s. In the 1990s, it was distributed by fax. It now crosses the globe as e-mail.
Cons such as this -- offering people a chance to dip into others' fortunes -- are nothing new.
In the early 1900s, American swindler Oscar Hartzell talked more than 100,000 Midwesterners out of millions with a scheme to recover money that supposedly belonged to Sir Francis Drake. If they contributed to a legal fund for Drake's heirs, Hartzell told them, contributors would get a share of Drake's $100 billion estate. Hartzell eventually went to prison, where people kept sending him money.
Get rich quick The 419 scam offers people a chance to get rich quick. But once lured in, they are financially gutted.
"I lost my retirement," said Jane, referring to the Public Employees Retirement System account she emptied. In her mid-40s and years from retirement, she could only access her PERS account by quitting her government job.
She now works in private industry for one-third her former salary.
The original e-mail Jane received claimed to be from a man named Sani Aeu. He said he was a Nigerian doctor who wanted help getting money out of his country so it could be used to bring clean water to his village.
The plan was to transfer the money to Jane's bank, then back to a foreign account in Aeu's control. Aeu was describing a money-laundering scheme and said Jane could keep 25 percent of the multimillion-dollar transfer.
Jane said she was asked to meet in London with an official from a securities company who would arrange the transfer. She flew to London twice.
"They showed me a whole trunk full of money and said there were five more trunks like that," she said.
"They said we were going to go meet someone at the bank the next morning and take care of all the legalities. They called me that night at my motel and said there was a problem."
The "problem" was the need for 13,000 British pounds -- more than $20,000 -- to cover transaction fees. Jane got part of the money by making cash withdrawals with her credit cards. Six months later, she scraped together the rest.
Calls for more fees came in, and Jane paid them. Back in Oregon, she received a fax claiming to be from an Arkansas bank that had $25 million on deposit for her. The fax requested more fees before the bank could release the cash.
"I tried to look up the bank on the Internet, and I couldn't find it," Jane said. "I'm not a detective or anything, but that didn't seem right. It sort of put up a red flag."
She said she called Aeu, and he vowed to get to the bottom of it if she would fly to Nigeria or wire him $7,500.
Finally, she saw things for what they were and let the matter drop.
To cover the so-called fees, Jane refinanced her house at a higher interest rate and used her equity to pay for the credit card withdrawals. Before the swindle, she had 13 years left on her original loan. She now has 30.
"It's been a mess," she said. "I've got it in a manageable place, I think. I'm not actually going bankrupt."
Little expense, big payoff "This is basically a worldwide problem," said Marr of the Secret Service. "We get about 600 faxes a month reporting the fraud.
"In 2001, we had over $950,000 in losses. That's probably just the tip of the iceberg. Most people are not going to report it. They are embarrassed and feel foolish."
Marr's estimate may be understated. In 1998, when the Nigerian letter primarily moved by snail mail and fax, the U.S. Postal Service estimated annual U.S. losses approached $100 million.
Today, governments around the world are trying to fight it, Marr said, but it is like trying to cure dandruff. There's no halting it; it just keeps coming back.
People running the swindle spend $1 an hour for Internet access at African cyber cafes. From there, millions of appeals are mailed out on free e-mail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Lycos.
"The expense of doing this is absolutely minimal," Marr said, "and the windfall profits that are possible from one or two gullible people are tremendous." John Snell: 503-294-5949; johnsnell@news.oregonian.com
The rest vote for rats.
"The travel agent said, 'You guys are idiots. You could lose all the town's money and get killed.' "
If I was the travel agent, I would have charged them $15,000 for “fraud detection and intervention.”
The idiots would have paid it.
In fact, I am today a multimillionaire thanks to my good friend Dr. Innocent Bawbaw Wakatumbe (Esq.).
How did I do it, you ask? For $5 I'll tell you.
<|:)~
She now works in private industry for one-third her former salary.
There are millions of idiots like this stupid woman sucking up tax dollars every single day. The only upside to this scam is if this moron (now finally off the taxpayer teat) wasn't replaced.
And we have another datapoint: Real people, with real companies, doing real work, calculated that this twit was really only worth one-third of her former pay. And they say there's no room to cut government costs . . . . . . .
She now works in private industry for one-third her former salary.......POOR BABY.
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