I want you to picture probably the most famous
email in the history of the internet. You know
the one? Oh, absolutely. The subject line is
always in all caps, right? Right. It's like a
urgent business proposal. Right. Or maybe it
starts with Dear Beloved or Respected Sir. And
it is almost always from a prince. Or a barrister.
Or the weeping widow of some deposed general.
Yeah, and they always have the exact same problem.
They are sitting on this massive fortune, millions
of dollars, gold bullion, maybe blood diamonds,
but it is locked in a vault somewhere. Exactly.
And they need you, just some total stranger on
the internet, to help them get it out. Right,
which is just, on its face, ridiculous. It is
the oldest punchline on the web. I mean, we screenshot
these things, we turn them into memes, we forward
them to our friends just to have a laugh at the
terrible grammar. We do. But that's the thing.
But here's the cold reality check that we are
going to unpack today in this deep dive. While
we are all laughing at these emails, people are
losing everything. And I don't just mean their
life savings. I mean their actual lives. It is
a massive global industry. And honestly, just
calling it the Nigerian Prince scam, it kind
of minimizes it. It makes it sound like a cartoon
villain. It really does. So what is the actual
term for it? The formal term in the fraud world
is an advance fee scam or advance fee fraud.
And when you really look under the hood of how
this works, it is a terrifyingly sophisticated
psychological machine. So that is our mission
for this deep dive. We are going to stop treating
this topic like a joke. We have pulled together
research, case studies, and historical records,
and we are going to look at the history, which
goes back way further than the internet, by the
way. Way further. We're going to look at the
psychology of why we actually fall for it and
the genuinely dark reality of what happens when
the victim's money finally runs out. And I think
we should start by just breaking down that core
mechanism because it is deceptively simple. The
name advance fee describes it perfectly. Right.
So how does the hook actually work? Well, the
victim has promised this massive reward. It could
be an inheritance, lottery winnings, a lucrative
government contract. But to get it, they just
have to pay a small fee up front. The classic
send me five thousand dollars for legal fees
and I will release the five million to your bank
account. Exactly. But the catch is once you pay
that first five thousand. The finish line suddenly
moves. There's always a new problem. Always.
Now there is a surprise tax or now there is a
bribe you have to pay to a stubborn bank manager.
Now there's a foreign transfer fee. It becomes
this infinite loop of payments that really only
ends when the victim is either totally bankrupt
or they finally snap out of it and realize it's
a lie. Now I have always heard this specific
type of fraud referred to as a 419 scam. Is that
just like Law enforcement slang? It's actually
a specific legal citation. Section 419 of the
Nigerian Criminal Code is the part that deals
with fraud. So in the cybersecurity industry,
these operators are often just called 419ers.
Oh, OK. But if you go to Lagos, the local slang
on the street is completely different. They call
it Yahoo, Yahoo. Yahoo, Yahoo. Wait, like the
search engine? The very same. It is literally
a fossil from the early days of the web. It's
wild. Yeah, back in the late 90s and early 2000s,
Yahoo Mail was the free platform of choice. So
the guys sitting in the cyber cafes sending out
these massive email blasts just became known
as Yahoo Boys. It's fascinating that there's
a whole subculture built around this, because
I remember reading in our sources that back in
the 80s, Nigeria had this perfect storm economically.
That did it. There was an oil crash, the economy
just completely tanked. And suddenly you had
this entire generation of university graduates
with absolutely zero job prospects. That is the
crucial context here. You had a highly educated,
very motivated, but desperately unemployed young
men. And then the internet arrived. So it became
a survival strategy. Exactly. It was a way to
make a living. And it even seeped into the pop
culture and the music over there. There is a
famous hip hop track by an artist named Nickom
Owo called I Go Chop Your Dollar. I Will Eat
Your Dollars. Yeah. That is not very subtle.
Not at all. The lyrics literally say, 419 is
just a game. I am the winner. You are the loser.
It openly glamorized the lifestyle, the fast
cars, the luxury living. It was framed almost
as a way to get back at the wealthy Western countries.
But we do need to be really careful with the
geography here, right? Because we keep saying
Nigeria, since that is the famous origin point
and the stereotype. But our sources are very
clear that this is not contained by Nigerian
borders anymore. Oh, not at all. It is a completely
transnational enterprise now. We see massive
volumes of advanced fee fraud. originating from
the Ivory Coast, Togo, South Africa, the Netherlands,
Spain. It's everywhere. Yeah. And Jamaica is
a huge hotbed for lottery -specific scams right
now. So it's essentially a global franchise model
at this point. But here is the thing that has
always totally baffled me about this. And I think
this is where most people listening probably
get tripped up too. What's that? The quality
of the emails themselves. They are just terrible.
You mean visually? Visually, structurally, grammatically,
logically. I mean, if I were a criminal mastermind
trying to steal millions of dollars, I would
at least run my pitch through a spell checker.
I would hire a copywriter. Right. It feels like
the overwhelming badness of the email would just
scare everyone away. Right. Why haven't they
improved the script over the last 20 years? This
is actually one of my absolute favorite pieces
of research we looked at. There is a researcher
named Cormac Hurley from Microsoft Research who
did a deep dive into exactly this question. And
his conclusion is brilliant. What did he find?
He found that the typos are not a bug. They are
a feature. A feature? How on earth is looking
completely incompetent a feature for a con artist?
You have to think about it from the stammer's
perspective. Sending out 10 million emails is
cheap. It's virtually free. But actually talking
to a victim... That takes a lot of time. It takes
effort to groom someone, to exchange dozens of
emails, to build trust, to walk them through
a bank transfer. A scammer absolutely cannot
afford to waste three weeks talking to a skeptic
who is eventually going to spot a red flag and
back out. Oh. Oh, I see where you're going with
this. Yeah. It is a filter. It is a brilliant,
roofless filter. By making the initial email
completely ridiculous, full of bizarre spelling
errors and totally implausible claims about locked
vaults, they ensure that anyone with a critical
eye deletes it immediately. It naturally repels
the smart people. Exactly. It repels the skeptics.
So if you read that email and you still hit reply,
you have effectively self -selected as a viable
target. Precisely. You have signaled to the scammer
that you are either dusted enough, maybe elderly
and confused. or just gullible enough to fall
for the rest of the con. It saves the scammer
huge amounts of time by weeding out the false
positives. People like you or me who might reply
just to mess with them, but who will never actually
pay. That is just diabolically efficient. It's
like an algorithm for finding vulnerability.
They don't want the smartest victims. They want
the most compliant ones. Correct. And they actually
test that compliance again almost immediately
after you reply. Very often, the first thing
they ask for in the second or third email is
your bank account information. See, I always
assumed that was the ultimate end game. They
get the routing number, they drain the checking
account, and it's game over. Surprisingly, that
is rarely the actual goal. Bank transfers are
incredibly risky for scammers. They leave a solid
paper trail. They can be reversed by the bank.
And if a scammer tries to pull a large sum of
money out of a random account, modern bank fraud
detection usually catches it and freezes everything.
So why do they ask for it so early on? It is
just another psychological test. If you are willing
to hand over sensitive financial info to a stranger,
you are officially hooked. Once you provide it,
the scammer usually pivots right away. What do
they say? They'll say something like, oh, actually,
my friend, we cannot use the direct bank transfer
for the initial legal fee because of strict government
regulations. You need to use Western Union or
MoneyGram instead. Ah, right. The irreversible
payment methods. Exactly. Cash on the wire. Because
once you send money via Western Union to a fake
ID in Lagos or Johannesburg, it is gone. It is
quite literally like throwing a suitcase of cash
out of a moving helicopter. You are never getting
it back. So the typos filter the audience, the
bank request tests their blind obedience, and
then the wire transfer takes the actual cash.
It's a funnel. A highly optimized sales funnel,
yes. Now, you mentioned earlier that this whole
mechanic predates the Internet. I know confidence
tricks are old, obviously. But are we talking
about the exact same script? The wealthy person
trapped with a fortune. Almost word for word,
the same script. If you go back to the late 18th
century, there was a wildly popular con called
the Spanish prisoner. Wait, the 1700s? Yes, the
1700s. Con artists would write physical letters
to wealthy merchants in England or France. And
the story in the letter was always. I am a wealthy
aristocrat, and I have been wrongly imprisoned
in a castle in Spain. Let me guess. They had
a hidden fortune. Exactly. I have a fortune hidden
away, but I need a small amount of money right
now to bribe the prison guards to let me escape.
If you send the bribe money, I will share the
fortune with you. And let me take another guess.
I bet they also had a beautiful daughter. They
almost always had a beautiful daughter. The letter
would say, my lovely daughter is here with me
in hiding. And as a bonus, I will give you her
hand in marriage. So even the romance scam angle
is centuries old. It is ancient. There is another
famous version from the 1800s called The Letter
from Jerusalem. We found that one detailed in
the memoirs of Eugene Francois Vidocq, who was
this famous French. criminal turned police detective.
Wow. And then a strikingly similar variant swept
through Germany in 1922. The medium constantly
changes. It goes from handwritten letters to
faxes, to emails, to social media DMs, but the
basic software running in the human brain. That
hasn't changed a bit. We are still driven by
greed and by the deep desire to be the hero of
someone else's story. That is the real hook,
isn't it? It is not just about getting rich quick.
It is about feeling like you are the one special
person chosen by fate to help this desperate
prince. Precisely. It flatters the ego. But as
we've moved into the modern era, people generally
have gotten wise to the prince narrative. So
the stammers have had to diversify their portfolios.
The prince is now the recruiter. Ah, the employment
scams. These ones honestly make me the angriest
because they specifically target people who are
already struggling to find work. It is incredibly
predatory. You post your resume on a legitimate
job board and you get an out of the blue offer.
It's a great salary, full benefits, work from
home. But before you can officially start, HR
tells you that you need to pay upfront for a
background check or a specialized training software
or a work permit. And then there's that really
specific twist on this, the mystery shopper variant.
This one is so clever because the scammers actually
send you money first. Yes. This one relies on
a very specific quirk in the banking system.
The victim is hired to be a mystery shopper,
and they receive a real -looking cashier's check
in the mail for, let's say, $2 ,000. OK. Their
first assignment is to deposit the check, keep
$200 as their salary, and then wire the remaining
$1 ,800 to a specific service to test the speed
and customer service of the local Western Union.
And so the victim goes to their bank, deposits
the check, sees the funds appear in their available
balance the next day, and thinks, wow, this is
totally legitimate, I have the money. Right,
because federal law requires banks to make deposited
funds available to customers quickly, usually
within a day or two. But the physical check itself
is a forgery, and it hasn't actually cleared
the issuing bank yet. Oh no. So two weeks later,
the forged check bounces. The bank realizes it's
fake and clause that $2 ,000 right back out of
the victim's account. But the victim has already
voluntarily wired $1 ,800 of their own real money
to the scammers. That money is just gone. Gone.
And now the victim often owes their bank money,
on top of losing their own savings. It effectively
turns the victim into the bag holder for a fake
check. That is brutal. And then you have the
scams that target our hearts instead of our wallets
directly, the pet scams. Yes. You see ads online
for high -value puppies. French bulldogs, Yorkies.
The seller always has a heartbreaking story.
I am a missionary moving to a country that doesn't
allow dogs. I just want a good home for him.
You just need to pay for the shipping. Then the
dog doesn't even exist. Doesn't exist. Not even
a real picture. You pay the shipping fee and
then a fake airline emails you. They say the
crate is too small. Send $500 for a climate -controlled
crate. Then the dog needs surprise travel insurance.
Then emergency veterinary shots at a layover.
The fees never end. But the absolute darkest
evolution of this has to be the romance scam.
We touched on it with the Spanish prisoner's
daughter. But with modern social media, this
has turned into industrial warfare on human loneliness.
It really is. This is the long con. Scammers
will spend months, sometimes over a year, just
building an emotional relationship. They text
you good morning every single day. They Skype
you. And they use stolen video loops of attractive
people or voice changing software to pull it
off. They make the victim feel completely seen
and loved. And then the inevitable crisis hits.
Right. I am finally coming to visit you, but
I am stuck at customs and need visa money. Or
my child was in a terrible car accident and I
need hospital fees. And because the victim is
genuinely in love, they pay. There is a deeply
heartbreaking case we looked at regarding a woman
named Jet Jacobs. Yes, the Australian woman.
She was 67 years old, living in Australia. She
met a man online who called himself Jesse Oroo.
And she really thought he was the one. She did.
Over the course of three years, she sent him
over $90 ,000. But the tragedy is that it didn't
stop at just financial ruin. In 2013, she actually
flew to Johannesburg, South Africa to finally
meet him in person. Two days after she arrived,
she was found dead in her rented villa. Omoko
had immediately fled the country back to Nigeria.
He was eventually tracked down and arrested,
but due to a severe lack of forensic evidence
regarding the actual cause of death, he was only
charged with fraud. That is just horrifying.
It really shifts the perspective away from this
being a silly email in your spam folder to recognizing
these people as predatory monsters. It absolutely
does. and it forces us to ask a really difficult
question. Why do people stay in these scams even
when the red flags start waving right in their
face? Obviously, a huge part of it is the sunk
cost fallacy. Right. The idea that I've already
paid $5 ,000. I have to pay this next $1 ,000
fee or I lose everything I've invested. Exactly.
But there is a very specific legal trap here
too, right? Something called the unclean hands
doctrine. This seems to be the psychological
glue that keeps victims silent. Yeah, let's talk
about that because it is essentially pure black.
and it is baked right into the scammers initial
narrative. Think about the pitch they use. I
need you to help me smuggle stolen gold out of
the country or help me hide this embezzled government
money from auditors. So if you agree to help
them, you are explicitly agreeing to commit a
major crime. Exactly. The victim genuinely believes
they are acting as a co -conspirator in international
money laundering or bribery. So when the scammer
finally steals their money, who are they going
to call? You can't call the police. You can't
just say, hello, officer. I was actively trying
to launder millions for a corrupt warlord, and
he ripped me off. They are completely trapped
by their own guilt. There was a really prominent
case involving a businessman from San Diego named
James Adler. He lost over $5 million to a scheme
exactly like this. And he actually tried to fight
back. He tried to sue the Nigerian government
officials and the central bank in a U .S. federal
court. That sounds incredibly bold. How did that
actually play out? It failed completely. The
court applied that unclean hands doctrine. The
judge essentially ruled. You willingly entered
into a contract to perform an illegal act, specifically
bribery and money laundering. You cannot use
the United States court system to recover losses
from an illegal contract. Wow. So the legal system
essentially protects the scammer because the
victim's hands were dirty too. And that profound
shame, that terror of admitting complicity in
a felony, is exactly what allows these syndicates
to operate with near total impunity. But sometimes,
as we saw with court Jet Jacobs, the silence
isn't just about shame or legal fears. It is
about immediate physical safety. I want to talk
about the invitation to visit phase because this
seems to be the endgame for the really high -rolling
victims. This is undoubtedly the most dangerous
phase of the con. If a victim has really deep
pockets but starts getting skeptical and refuses
to send more wires, the scammer changes tactics.
They say, fine, don't believe me, keep your money.
But if you want the fortune, you have to fly
to Nigeria or South Africa or Togo. Come meet
the bank manager in person. Sign the release
papers yourself. And the victim thinks, well,
OK, that proves them must be real. A scammer
wouldn't invite me to a physical bank. Exactly.
But they aren't walking into a bank. They're
walking straight into a coordinated kidnapping.
In 1999, a Norwegian millionaire named Kajet
Helmo was lured to South Africa under this exact
pretense. He was murdered. In 2004, a Greek man
named George McEnally was lured to South Africa
and killed. In 2008, a Javanese businessman.
Osamah Hitomi was kidnapped the moment he landed
in Johannesburg and held for a five million dollar
ransom. It's just terrifying. You get on a commercial
flight thinking you're about to close the business
deal of a lifetime and you are met at the arrivals
gate by an armed organized crime syndicate. And
the psychological toll of all this manipulation,
it literally breaks people's minds. Sometimes
that violence actually goes the other direction.
In 2003, there was a terrible tragedy in Prague.
A 72 -year -old Czech man named Zsuzsi Pasovsky
had lost his entire life savings, about $600
,000, to a Nigerian advance fee scam. And he
just finally snapped. He was completely desperate.
He went to the Nigerian embassy in Prague to
demand help recovering his money. The embassy
officials, of course, couldn't do anything. It's
not like the embassy operates the scam or has
the money. Pasofsky pulled out a handgun right
there and shot the Nigerian consul dead. That
is just tragedy stacked on top of tragedy. It
really shows the massive blast radius of these
crimes. It is not just numbers vanishing from
a bank ledger. It is entire families destroyed,
lives ended, and normal people pushed to the
absolute brink of sanity. It is deeply sobering.
And just to put a scale on this, the FBI reported
that in a recent single year, Americans lost
billions of dollars to these types of confidence
frauds. And remember, because of the shame and
the unclean hands trap, that number is only what
was actually reported. The real number is likely
double or triple that. Oh, and before we wrap,
we should mention that mobile tower variant we
saw in the research, just to show how localized
this can get. Oh, right. The one in India and
Pakistan. Yeah. Instead of Prince, scammers target
rural landowners. They promise them huge rental
payouts if they let a telecom company install
a mobile cell tower on their farm. But first,
the farmer has to pay for government clearance
charges and fake land survey fees. It's the exact
same advance fee software, just a different skin
to match the local economy. Exactly. So we have
gone from the funny Prince meme all the way to
kidnapping, murder, and billions in global losses.
It really feels like we need to fundamentally
change how we interact with our spam folders.
We really do. I think the major takeaway from
all these sources is that advanced fee fraud
is a historic, centuries -old confidence trick
that has just perfectly adapted to the digital
age. It weaponizes our own baseline psychology
against us, our greed, our hope, our desperate
need for connection, and our fear of missing
out. And it uses that genius filter of bad grammar
to make sure it only finds the people who are
the most vulnerable to that manipulation. Right.
It finds them, it isolates them, and then it
uses shame and legal fear to keep them completely
quiet. So I want to leave everyone listening
with a final thought today. The next time you
open your email and you see that ridiculous subject
line, Dearest one, I have a proposition and you
see all the crazy typos and you start to chuckle.
Stop. Please don't laugh at it. Because that
email is not a joke. It is a finely tuned, highly
efficient weapon. And the fact that we laugh
at it. That is exactly what the syndicates are
counting on. Our laughter makes us dismiss it
as harmless. It lets us ignore the scale of the
industry. And while we are laughing, that weapon
is sliding right past us, searching the internet
for the one person who doesn't get the joke.
And it is going to take absolutely everything
they have. That is the grim reality. But I'll
add one more thing for you to chew on, something
we didn't cover in the sources, but that is coming
fast. Think about artificial intelligence. Generative
AI can write perfect, highly persuasive, grammatically
flawless emails. It can clone voices perfectly.
When the scammers no longer need the bad grammar
to filter out the skeptics, when they can generate
bespoke, highly personalized traps for smart
people at scale, how are any of us going to spot
the hook before it's too late? That is a terrifying
thought to end on. Stay skeptical out there,
friends. And remember, if it sounds too good
to be true, it definitely is. Thanks for diving
deep with us. We will see you on the next one.