It continues to amaze me that anyone would fall for 419 scams (advance fee fraud). Normally I don’t even bother looking at the few 419 emails that make it through my spam filter, but today I happened to read part of one. Surprisingly, it admits in the very first paragraph that many people lose money to Nigerian frauds:
It is known that, many Foreigners have lost money to Nigeria through: Fraud, Unpaid-Contract or others.
Presumably the scammers want the recipient of this email to believe that he or she might become a recipient of some of that “lost money.”
Remember, if a deal sounds too good to be true, it is. No one is actually going to give you millions of dollars for helping them get money out of Nigeria, or anywhere else. I find it astonishing that anyone would actually fall for this, but according to the U.S. Secret Service, there have been confirmed losses in the US of over $100 million.