Investigators in the U.K. who are tracking him note that, since Dec. 1, 2008, Macjon has targeted 13.5 million Americans with the work-at-home e-mail scam. Inve

Investigators in the U.K. who are tracking him note that, since Dec. 1, 2008, Macjon has targeted 13.5 million Americans with the work-at-home e-mail scam. Investigators estimate his success rate at around 0.1%. That's 13,500 victims from whom he's stolen as much as $40.5 million. Oh, the title is pure guesswork. That big, big number is essentially pulled out of thin air. Frighteningly, Macjon is merely one of about 100 modern-day 419ers plying the trade. Seriously? This must be a much larger "industry"? Maybe the successful ones are that few, but there's got to be tens of thousands trying their hand at it at least? He and the others buy American e-mail address lists from about a dozen U.S. based "lead sellers." What? Do these companies operate in the open? I was under the impression that the botnet owners that do harvest email addresses were purely criminal organizations? The U.S. Secret Service, which used to aggressively track Nigerian scammers, no longer updates its database of 419 scam letters as regularly, owing to budgetary constraints and manpower issues. Or, perhaps, the explosion of the scam industry and the increased sophistication of the tools make it completely useless to keep a database of scam letters? I admit I'm not keeping up-to-date with email scams, the spamfilters are winning the fight for me, but it sounds like this article is horribly out of date or popularized, and if so, what's it doing on here? Or am I wrong? Are there only actually a small number of email scammers in Nigeria? Do they get their email addresses from a handful of legit companies?