All About 419 Scams - Don't Fall for the "Helpless" Prince in Nigeria

Have you ever gotten one of those emails that claims you can retrieve "x" million dollars for helping a dying businessman, or an African prince? Odds are you have, and the first time you got one, you may have been excited, and may even have felt special. Unfortunately, it is those emotions that have caused people to lose tens of thousands of dollars, and for some, over a hundred thousand.

In case you do not know, a 419 scam is a scam in which the recipient is lured into sending small sums of money in exchange for a much larger sum of money later. 419 scams are considered advanced fee frauds, and they are named after the section of Nigerian Criminal Code that they violate. The thing about 419 scams is that in the beginning, the scammer does not say you will ever need to pay fees, so it looks completely legitimate, and that is the danger. Then, once the sender has established trust with the recipient, they then ask for a small fee, and eventually start asking for fees in larger and larger amounts. The recipient feels like they have already come this far, so they might as well finish (plus they see it as a wise investment, considering how much they will make at the end). 419 emails are beautifully and professionally crafted, so they can easily lure people who are not educated into falling for them. The scams have snatched even the smartest of people; for example, a mayor in the United States dipped into the town's treasury to pay fees in a 419 scam (the fees ended up totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars and the government official went to prison). As you can see, basically anyone can be taken in by a 419 scam, and the results can be devastating.

Besides the 419 scam, there are other, similar scams that you need to be knowledgeable about. There are "online lottery" scams, in which you are told you have won a lottery where random emails were drawn from all over the world, and like a 419 scam, initially it does not say you will have to pay a fee. Some online scams try to get your passwords using a technique called phishing; a legitimate-looking email is sent from a company you trust (like PayPal) saying there is a problem with your account, and to log in to fix it. They have a link for you to log in, but the link does not go to PayPal; in fact, the URL it links to always looks "fishy" (the first tip that it is weird is that the URL is not simply paypal.com). Unfortunately, many people do not check for that and get taken in by the scam. Phishing is easy to avoid as long as you check the log-in link on the email, or you log-in to the said site through the home page. 419 and similar scams are easy to avoid because they all follow the same structure and basically make no sense (why would a Nigerian prince approach a random stranger to help him get $60,000,000?)

Some people have struck back against 419ers. Dateline NBC scammed the scammers when they met up with them face to face and had a confrontation. Regular Internet users have baited the scammers, pretending that they are going to pay the fees but never doing so (this can waste a lot of the scammers' time). Anybody can bait a 419 scammer, but it takes some amount of skill to do so without letting the scammer know you are just playing around with them.

419 scams will never stop. The endeavors are the primary source of income for many people in Nigeria, and they are so lucrative, why would they want to stop? Despite all the information and news about them, there will always be people who do not know about them, and even some who have read about the scams but just want to believe that this one may be real, and they can get rich beyond their wildest dreams (people like that deserve to be scammed).