Among the enormous number of scams that threaten us on the Internet, possibly one of the first scams that became popular globally was the so-called “Nigerian prince scam”.
If you have been a user of email and/or social networks for a couple of decades, you will undoubtedly have come across a message on some occasion that could be summarized in the following terms:
“Hi. I’m a Nigerian prince/millionaire who needs to transfer large sums of dollars abroad discreetly. Could you send me some money now and I’ll give you a lot in return, but later?”
Basically, this scam consists of the cybercriminal pretending to be someone wealthy and respectable that, because of war and/or political persecution, desperately need to draw a large amount of money of your country and requests your confidential help (including a small advance payment on your part) to overcome some supposed bureaucratic obstacle in exchange for later obtaining a significant percentage of the fortune.
Once the victim ‘stings’, the ‘prince’ will ask for more and more ‘advance payments’ (there is always some new bureaucratic obstacle to allege) until the first is aware that he has been the victim of a scam (or runs out of money).
It does not matter that the supposed prince never comes to clarify how he has found, specifically, you and with your email/social media account: the gullible are blinded by ‘opportunity’, and the skeptics dismiss the message as a scam long before they have to ask that question.
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Nigeria’s role in all this
Curiously, at least in the first years of dissemination of this scam, there was a detail of the message that was completely true: behind it was some desperate Nigerian because of the war and/or corruption. In the early 1990s, young Nigerians faced two simultaneous phenomena: skyrocketing unemployment in a country without a welfare state…
…and the rise of cybercafés in the country, which facilitated access to sending e-mails at a very low cost. In short, what cyber scams (and, eventually, cybercrime in general) they became a profession of last resort for many of them… and it has remained so to this day, despite the economic improvement experienced since then by the country.
In fact, Wired, in an article published a year ago now (‘The long shadow of the Nigerian prince’s scam’) included some statements by Olubukola Stella Adesina, professor of International Relations at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), in which stated that, for international financial institutions
“now Nigerian bank checks are no longer viable international financial instruments. Nigerian Internet and email service providers are already blacklisted by Internet email blocking systems. Some companies even block entire segments of traffic online originating from Nigeria”.
The prince is gone, the scam remains
Today, of course, the ‘Nigerian prince’ is a worn-out figure because of his great popularity, and it is rare to see him used as a ‘hook’ in new scams. But the basic outline of it has been reused over and over since by changing the packaging. First came the extension of it to the rest of Africa: the ‘prince’ could already be from any sub-Saharan country.
Later, innovations began to arrive: became famous using Aisha Gaddafi (a real person, daughter of the dethroned dictator of Libya) as a way of convincing the recipients of the message that they could sink their teeth into the hidden fortune of the late North African leader. Then the scheme was repeated in the Iraq military scam and finally it has ended up being applied even to the ‘love scam’.
When the ‘Nigerian prince’ was ‘the Spanish prisoner’
However, the origin of this scam goes far beyond Nigeria and the Internet era: already at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, there were people who —north of the Pyrenees— reported having received letters from compatriots of supposed good standing economic (sometimes they also posed as distant relatives) that they said they were in Spanish prisons without being able to access their fortunepromising to reward the potential victim handsomely if he sent them a small amount to bribe your jailers and thus allow them to be released.
Even without all the technology involved, the profitability of the scam for the scammer and the scammed was very similar to the current one.
Image | Poster for ‘The Prince of Zamunda’ (Paramount Pictures), Tumisu on Pixabay
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