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‘Nigerian Prince’ Email Scammer Arrested in Louisiana
- seba_dos1 9y agoGoodnight sweet prince!
- thesmallestcat 9y ago> Michael Neu, who is neither Nigerian nor a prince Hold on ABC, we'll see what a jury of peers thinks of His Serenity.
- skimaskninja87 9y agoSo it's not a huge Nigerian business based out of Nigeria after all, huh???
- gordo4 9y agoFTA > According to the Slidell Police Department, some of Neu’s co-conspirators actually do live in Nigeria. Neo was the middleman who sent the money to the real brains behind the operation.
- stephenhuey 9y ago419 scams began long before most people were using email. Around 27 years ago, my relatives in Texas sent us a tape of 60 Minutes when I was in Lagos, and in the opening monologue the person said "Nigeria is the most corrupt country I have ever reported on or from." Then they revealed lots of American businesses were scammed into thinking they were sending an initial round of money for valid business contracts with government or Nigerian companies. These scams have never been a large organized effort by one entity and the addition of email added in a whole new wave of scammers who enjoyed a lower barrier to entry since less overhead was needed and they could still enjoy enough successes with less sophistication. A lot of them are simply young unemployed guys killing time in internet cafes. In the late 90s the USPS and Secret Service both already had websites warning about 419 scams and although most people are only familiar with the cheesy emails, there is a history of massive amounts of dollars being siphoned out through a wide variety of storytelling by countless actors.
- nathanvanfleet 9y agoMy understanding is that those young guys in internet cafes are not all just independently doing it, but are working a job doing it. Which I guess I actually did for a summer in Canada when for two weeks I sold magazine subscriptions that also awarded prizes when you subscribed (you never got them). There was 2-3 people who actually ran the call center and made the real money. My friend worked there longer than me and he found out their names were pseudonyms. I think they eventually shuttered the call center and disappeared one day.
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoBesides the fact that Nigerian scammers often have middlemen in North American and Europe to assist the process, 419 scams have come to be commonly perpetuated from a number of other West African countries besides Nigeria.
- ThinkingGuy 9y agoI don't know about others here, the scam emails I get (and I get several per week) always claim to be from Burkina Faso, _never_ Nigeria. And it's been like that for years. In fact, despite being pretty good at geography, I can't recall what the capital of Nigeria is, but I can rattle off the capital of Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou) with ease, and even spell it correctly, just from seeing it in all these emails.
- mkagenius 9y agoIndia’s Vice President recently got scammed in a weight loss scheme. https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/newsindia/when-vp-venkaiah-naidu-was-fooled-by-fake-weight-loss-advertisement/ar-BBHtcMj https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/newsindia/when-vp-venkaiah-na...
- CamelCaseName 9y agoThat's quite similar to this story, the weight loss company was based in the US! Also, for those thinking of skipping this article, the scam wasn't fake pills, but rather that the pills would not be shipped unless an additional payment was made.
- nukeop 9y agoTo anyone interested in turning the tables on these scammers, I recommend this website: http://www.419eater.com http://www.419eater.com Dozens of hours of entertainment guaranteed.
- scoot 9y agoI prefer Spamnesty, as it's fully automated. You just forward the spam to sp@mnesty.com, then watch the fun at http://spa.mnesty.com http://spa.mnesty.com. (http://www.mnesty.com http://www.mnesty.com is bogus business website with a tongue in cheek strapline.)
- chrissoundz 9y agoSomebody should strap on some machine learning to this. It would be so much more effective - and probably funnier! Spamnesty ICO / kickstarter maybe?
- netsharc 9y agoDear Sir/Madam, I am an early adopter of bitcoins with 10000 bitcoins in my wallet...
- qaq 9y agowhy be so modest I am Satoshi Nakamoto creator of bitcoin
- StavrosK 9y agoActually, I might as well do an ICO. Does anyone know how to do one? I'm going to put various perks in, such as customized spam to all investors. (I made Spamnesty)
- acangiano 9y ago> I AM ONLY BEGGING YOU WITH THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS The site is a treasure trove.
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- NextHendrix 9y agoBit ironic that he might literally have to send emails to friends and family asking for monetary help for his lawyer fees.
- pandacat 9y agoThey didn't caught the prince, all they got is one of it's little hands who was in charge of collecting funds in the US and then wire them to Nigeria. Those little hands are often poor and elderly people that are naive enough to believe it is a legitmate business and are not aware of it's illegality.
- leemailll 9y agoA piece on New Yorker 11 years ago (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/05/15/the-perfect-mark https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/05/15/the-perfect-ma...) on this kind of scam.
- SOLARSYSTEM 9y agoIf you open the article, you will notice that the word "White" is in the title. Todays news has nothing to do with journalism, it is about nitpicking to fit whichever agenda you have. In fact that entire website is a bunch of pathetic filth: "Is Cold Weather Racist?" "The Most Useless Types of White People" The Root is a black news website, so perhaps I will make a white news website of my very own; I doubt whichever factual information I spout will get any coverage on Hacker News, though. You snowflakes would not be able to handle reality and it will be swept aside as "racist" and against policy, that is, before Cloudfare gets around to shutting me down.
- moron4hire 9y agoYou don't think there is perhaps any other way to read that headline? Like, "a non-African man in the US has been arrested for a crime where nobody ever gets arrested because the perpetrators are usually in Africa."
- orblivion 9y agoIn general I'd agree, but this site is not any old news site: https://www.theroot.com/tag/white-tears https://www.theroot.com/tag/white-tears
- moron4hire 9y agoI'm not saying it makes it right, but for every one of these, there are a dozen right-wing sites saying similar or worse things about minorities. Some people were assholes on the internet. Nothing to write home about.
- known 9y agoHe is white :)
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoAnd? There are folks with various skin colors around the world. The only thing your comment really illustrates is the stereotype you have of possible Nigeria-based scammers.
- krylon 9y agoMy mother's husband is a retired police officer who spent ~20 years working business-related crime, and he once told me that the "Nigerian Prince" scam even predates the Internet, it started out on Fax. Some things, apparently, do not change. Or at least not very quickly. It is kind of sad that there are people who are so gullible, but I wonder how one can live with oneself exploiting this gullibility.
- ilamont 9y agoI used to work for a trading company in Taiwan from 1993-94. We would get letters in the regular postal mail from African countries with similar pitches.
- nathanvanfleet 9y agoThere is a really great documentary following an older man who constantly falls for 419 scams. Ultimately he is elderly but I think also suffered some brain damage. But just somehow not enough to lose his power of attorney. Frankly there are those people out there. It was a sad story.
- macintux 9y agoIt doesn't take brain damage. Everyone is very good at filtering information to match what they already believe. And once it becomes known you believe something, good grief you'll never back down.
- e40 9y agobut I wonder how one can live with oneself exploiting this gullibility. I think it takes a sociopath to pull off this scam as a profession.
- pavlov 9y agoI suspect many of the young African men working these scams genuinely believe that the targeted Westerners have so much money that the scams won't seriously impact them. The wealth gap is enormous.
- 0xmohit 9y agoHave been receiving emails from the prince since 1996. Never responded myself, but I'm familiar with a few who responded and were burnt. Another class of scam that I've heard of frequently over the past few years is a job offer. Such offers typically offer more $ than Google/Facebook would offer but people still fall for those. They typically ask for money in order to process visa and other formalities.
- exabrial 9y agoI'm sort of sad about this. Him and I have had some fun conversations over the years.
- criloz2 9y agowhat a convenient post, I am getting some similar scam/spam straight from youtube https://imgur.com/1wD3bSP https://imgur.com/1wD3bSP. why youtube allow people send external links using their email address and logo.
- cmurf 9y agoApple allows the same thing: email appears to come from apple.com, has Apple and iTunes logos, and arrives in an icloud.com account. Why? It happens to my dad all too often and he's even clicked on the linked. He only became suspicious when it asked for his social security number. This is not about being gullible. This is about phishing emails being just convincing enough, and the email and web browser eco system not taking the problem seriously enough. Apple certainly has the engineering expertise to prevent this particular instance on their end, but no one's ready to throw in the towel and embargo any email containing a user facing URL that differs from the underlying HTML link for that URL.
- kuschku 9y agoAnd remember, Phishing can be entirely prevented. Just verify SPF, DKIM and DMARC headers and DNS records.
- SCHiM 9y agoThis will not save you unfortunately. Sure, it will prevent the attacker from using realname.tld. But it won't stop an attacker from using real-name.tld, or realname.othertld. Or real.name.tld. Non technical people won't see, or don't know, the difference between the urls. I've seen it hundreds of times, you tell people don't open the e-mail unless you're sure it's from name.tld. But people don't know the difference.
- kuschku 9y agoThat's correct — but this way, you can ensure that if the email is from the real TLD, it is real. And that's a massive advantage over previous systems. Sure, only cautious people, or tech people will take advantage, but it's better than nothing.
- brudgers 9y agoRelated, Why do Nigerian Scammers Say they are from Nigeria?, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fapps%2Fmobile%2Fpublication.aspx%3Fid%3D167719 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...
- shoover 9y agoWow. Busted on wire fraud and money laundering. This is the first I’ve heard of an arrest for this kind of scam. I always assumed it was too small time for law enforcement to bother with.
- CalChris 9y agoI really like the Nigerian Prince writing style in the same way I admire a good stack smashing exploit. So I think high school writing teachers should assign these letters as reading/writing exercises the way a Berkeley 61C kind of class should assign stack smashing as a problem set. You learn a little about style, voice and a convincing argument from these letters. Writing one forces you to step out of your self. It also inoculates you to a degree. I have been known to reply to friends' emails in Nigerian Prince style. ALL CAPS. FULL STOP.
- NelsonMinar 9y agoI can't wait to hear how this American guy ended up working with the Nigerian scammers. Nothing in the online reporting so far. I like to imagine he was himself a victim and then impressed the scammers with his intelligence and ability to help them conduct further scams.
- breakingcups 9y agoOften times, they are indeed victims themselves. When they've been wrung completely dry of literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and they are in such a deep hole they can't see a way out, the scammer will then ask them to assist in forwarding money. They are patsies, pure and simple. Other times people will just be recruited for a work-from-home job as a "remailer", which again involves acting as a proxy for payments, cheques or physical goods and shipping them off to the scammer. I can assure you of one thing. He didn't impress any scammers with his intelligence, the opposite in fact. They (the actual scammers) need people who do what they are told without questioning it too much. The real scammers don't get arrested. Usually.
- NelsonMinar 9y agoI believe your narrative; is there anything good published about that?
- SCHiM 9y agoPossibly related, and enjoyable: https://www.amazon.com/Spam-Nation-Organized-Cybercrime_from-Epidemic/dp/1501210424 https://www.amazon.com/Spam-Nation-Organized-Cybercrime_from... These don't document nigerian prince scams, but they are close.
- razakel 9y agoThey're even targeting kids here in Britain. Gangs post pictures on social media of huge wads of cash, then tell the kids that all they need to do is move a bank transfer. And suddenly you've duped a dopey 14-year-old into money laundering.
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- qwerty456127 9y agoWhy arrest them at all? They are so funny and ridiculous. Those whom they can scam are doomed anyway, the only way to possibly help them is to gain legal guardianship over them and filter their mail before it reaches them.
- phr4ts 9y agoCast psychology aside and focus solely on the economic benefit. $50 (18k NGN) is nothing to most Americans. However, 18k NGN is the current monthly national wage in Nigeria. It costs little or nothing to blast Copy & paste emails to 1 million people using hacked / free SMTP servers. Other factors to consider: It requires so little skill that 14 year old kids do it. Risk of getting cut is also super low. Police are on the look out for these scammers NOT to jail em but to collect their own share. They walk the scammers to the atm and take part or all of what they find there - usually, half. Unemployment rate is 25.20% but this doesn't tell the full story. Underemployment is another factor. As a result, many scammers are employed full time. The employment provides three benefits. 1. Free use of office computers and internet and most important electricity for scam. 2. A steady shock absorber income source for dry periods. 3. A camouflage to keep neighbors' tongues from wagging I've rambled. Scamming is so easy, has low risk, barrier to entry and high pay off. One other point i failed to mentioned. If you live in SV, tech will rub on you. Same applies living in developing nations. Scam will rub on ya.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- demxzy 9y ago18K NGN is the minimum monthly wage. As some said down below, a lot of this scam don't originate from Nigeria. > One other point i failed to mentioned. If you live in SV, tech will rub on you. Same applies living in developing nations. Scam will rub on ya. This is assuming scamming is a national pastime in developing countries. Its not in Nigeria (as a percentage of 190 million population) and I assume most developing countries.
- GuB-42 9y agoNigerian scams are often Nigerian in name only. In the present case only some members of the team are from Nigeria. There is a reason Nigeria is the country of choice and e-mails are so poorly written. First, it makes it obvious to those who know the trick, so that they don't call back and waste scammers time. Second, it gives a feeling of superiority to the mark.
- firefoxd 9y agoThere is a recent scam that targets those in the Dreamers program. A friend of mine recently received a very intimidating voicemail from someone claiming to be from the FBI. Shortly after an email followed. He figured out it was a scam after he called back and caught the scammer off guard. Then we googled the email content and saw many people reporting the same scam.
- joering2 9y agoNigerian scam is nothing new; in fact it is based on "Spanish prisoner" scam scheme from 18th century. It is interesting, however, how the new scams are created in the age of internet. The recent one is called "AirBnB scam". Basically you flood a message board, such as Craiglist, with phony non-existing apartment rental offers by non-existing individuals for 60% of the market value. You blast New York Craigslist with beautiful photos of rentals at $650 when normal price for average spot is $1,500. Once a gullible person answers, you auto-reply to them via human looking response (bot in reality) that tells them the place has been rented but they should check AirBnB website where more are posted... Its a classical scam of information phising with criminal conduct of false advertising (could be Federal offense if crosses state line) and few other statues. PG is very lucky they whole company is not facing jail time, but I think they stop it many years ago and usually statue of limitation is 5 years. Here is more info on spammy history (including FBI most wanted list) of AirBNB founder, Mr. Blecharczyk. http://gawker.com/5853754/the-seedy-spammy-past-of-airbnbs-co-founder http://gawker.com/5853754/the-seedy-spammy-past-of-airbnbs-c...
- joquarky 9y agoThere is another scam where the attacker gains access to a business email account and then uses the existing relationship to trick the recipient into sending money to an alternate account. The attacker waits for a legitimate invoice to go out, then follows that email with a forged email specially written to convince the recipient that the payment should be sent to another account. They duplicate the name, style, and tone of the person sending the invoice by reading the archived email conversations so that they can sound more trustworthy when making an excuse for the payment change.
- jaclaz 9y agoSomehow it must be said that besides being "gullible" the victims of these scams are also (to a lesser or larger degree) affected/driven by greed. They think that by sheer luck they are given the opportunity to make some (not so few) easy bucks for doing nothing or nearly nothing.
- stingraycharles 9y agoYes, but many people are. Think about pyramid schemes or gambling as similar "greed" or a desire for easy money driving the victims. They must, however, be protected from these scammers and shouldn't carry any blame.
- happyhotpocket 9y agoWe're talking about people who think they won the lottery without even buying a ticket. You say that these victims shouldn't carry any blame; at what point do you hold people responsible for their own actions?
- rkagerer 9y agoBut... Who am I going to transfer his millions to now?
- joeblau 9y agoI have a family friend who lost about $100k to this scam. She made a good amount of money writing books but lost a good chuck of it trying to "help out." I'm sure there are more people like him out there, but at least they are getting caught.
- racl101 9y agoGotta hand it to this guy. He hustled for his money.