Advance-fee scam
Based on Wikipedia: Advance-fee scam
In the summer of 2005, Nigerian authorities raided a market in the Oluwole section of Lagos. What they found inside read like a counterfeiter's fever dream: thousands of passports from multiple countries, ten thousand blank British Airways boarding passes, ten thousand United States Postal money orders, five hundred printing plates, and five hundred computers humming away. This wasn't a spy operation. It was just another day in the global industry of advance-fee fraud.
The premise is beautifully simple. Someone contacts you with an opportunity too good to be true—a fortune waiting to be claimed, a windfall that just needs a small fee to unlock. You pay the fee. Then another fee. Then another. The fortune never arrives because it never existed. By the time you realize this, your money has vanished through untraceable wire transfers, and the person who took it has already moved on to the next victim.
The Long Con with Ancient Roots
This isn't a product of the internet age. Not even close.
In the late eighteenth century, wealthy businessmen across Europe received letters from strangers claiming to be trying to smuggle someone connected to a prominent family out of a Spanish prison. The pitch was compelling: help bribe the guards, and when the prisoner escapes with their fortune, you'll receive a generous share. This was the Spanish Prisoner scam, and it worked for decades before anyone thought to name it.
Around the same time, possibly earlier, a letter circulated that historians call "The Letter from Jerusalem." We know about it because Eugène François Vidocq, a French criminal turned private investigator, documented it in his memoirs. Vidocq had seen enough cons to recognize the template.
By the 1830s, the formula had crystallized into something remarkably modern. One surviving letter opens with a line that could have been written yesterday: "Sir, you will doubtlessly be astonished to be receiving a letter from a person unknown to you, who is about to ask a favour from you..." The letter goes on to describe a casket containing sixteen thousand francs in gold and the diamonds of a late marchioness. All the recipient needed to do was help retrieve it.
Two centuries later, the structure remains identical. Only the delivery mechanism has changed.
Why Nigeria Became the Face of the Scam
The modern transnational version of this fraud can be traced to Germany in 1922, but it exploded in popularity during the 1980s, particularly in Nigeria. The scam became so associated with that country that it's often called the "Nigerian Prince" scam or, more technically, a "419 scam"—named after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, which covers fraud.
In Nigeria itself, practitioners call it "yahoo yahoo." The name comes from the email service many scammers used in the early days.
But here's something worth understanding: while Nigeria became the poster child for these scams, they don't primarily originate there anymore. In 2007, the head of Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission acknowledged that scam emails more frequently came from other African nations or from Eastern Europe. The Ivory Coast, Togo, South Africa, the Netherlands, Spain, and Jamaica all have significant advance-fee fraud operations.
So why does Nigeria remain synonymous with the crime? Partly reputation, partly strategy. Nigeria's history of corruption makes the stories more believable. When someone claims to be a government official trying to smuggle money out of a corrupt system, Nigeria's international image lends credibility. According to a director at Nigeria's National Security Adviser, there are now more non-Nigerian scammers claiming to be Nigerian than actual Nigerians running these schemes. The country's reputation has become a tool.
The Anatomy of a 419 Email
The classic advance-fee scam email follows a predictable pattern, and that predictability is actually part of the design.
The subject line establishes false legitimacy: "From the desk of Barrister [Name]" or "Your assistance is needed" or simply "Important." The sender presents themselves as someone with access to a large sum of money they cannot claim directly. Perhaps they're the wife of a deposed African leader who stashed millions before fleeing. Perhaps they're a bank employee who knows about a wealthy foreigner who died in a plane crash, leaving no will and no known relatives. Perhaps they're a United States soldier who stumbled upon a hidden cache of gold in Iraq.
The numbers are always enormous—millions or tens of millions of dollars. The promised cut is generous, typically between ten and fifty percent. The request seems minor: send some letterhead, provide bank account details, help with a small fee to bribe an official or satisfy some bureaucratic requirement.
These emails are famously riddled with spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and implausible claims. This isn't carelessness. A Microsoft researcher named Cormac Herley studied the phenomenon and reached a counterintuitive conclusion: the errors are a feature, not a bug. By sending emails that repel anyone with a functioning skepticism meter, scammers efficiently filter for the most gullible targets. Only the truly credulous respond, and those are exactly the people most likely to pay.
It's natural selection for marks.
The Escalation Trap
Once someone responds, the real manipulation begins.
The scammer builds confidence through a series of official-looking documents—letters with government stamps and seals, certificates, contracts. Many of these are produced by the same underground forging operations raided in Lagos. Some scammers maintain fake websites for fictional banks or government agencies. Multiple "characters" may appear in the correspondence: lawyers, bank officials, government ministers. Usually, one person controls all of them.
Then comes the first obstacle. There's always an obstacle.
"To transmit the money, we need to bribe a bank official. Could you help with a small loan?"
"To be a party to this transaction, you must have holdings at a Nigerian bank of at least one hundred thousand dollars."
"There's been an unexpected tax assessment. If we don't pay it immediately, the account will be frozen."
The victim sends money—almost always through Western Union or MoneyGram, services designed for quick, irreversible, and often anonymous transfers. The scammer pockets it. Then another obstacle appears. And another. Each time, the promise of the imminent big payout keeps the victim paying.
This is where the psychology becomes genuinely dark. The victim has now committed to the scheme. They've invested money. Walking away means accepting that investment is lost. Continuing offers the hope of recouping everything and more. This is the sunk cost fallacy weaponized.
It gets worse. The nature of the supposed deal—smuggling money out of a corrupt government, bribing officials, evading taxes—makes victims reluctant to tell anyone what they're doing. They've been made complicit in an apparent crime. How do you explain to your spouse or the police that you lost your savings trying to help a stranger commit international financial fraud?
Some victims become so invested that they convince themselves they can outsmart the scammer. They start thinking they'll find a way to take all the money instead of just their promised percentage. They've gone from victim to would-be accomplice to delusional schemer, all while the actual scammer methodically drains their bank account.
The Human Infrastructure of Fraud
Running these scams requires resources that might surprise you.
In cities like Lagos, certain areas have become known as scammer hubs. Festac Town, for instance, contains numerous internet cafés that cater specifically to this trade. These establishments operate on unusual schedules, sometimes locking their doors between ten-thirty at night and seven in the morning—not to keep people out, but to let scammers work undisturbed during the optimal hours for reaching victims in other time zones.
The technical setup is designed for anonymity. Scammers typically work from internet cafés with satellite connections. They use burner phones with prepaid SIM cards purchased without identification. Email addresses and content are managed through webmail interfaces, with data transferred via memory cards rather than through any traceable accounts. If scammers suspect they're being traced, they simply discard their phones and buy new ones.
The emails themselves are a numbers game of staggering scale. One scammer estimated he sent five hundred emails daily and received about seven replies. He claimed a seventy percent success rate in extracting money from anyone who responded. With tens of thousands of scammers sending similar volumes, even tiny response rates produce enormous returns.
In 2019, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 14,607 American citizens fell victim to advance-fee scams, collectively losing more than three and a half billion dollars. That's just one country in one year.
Who Becomes a Scammer?
The profile of a typical advance-fee fraudster challenges some assumptions.
Many come from relatively educated backgrounds. They have internet access and enough literacy to compose persuasive correspondence. But they also face genuine economic desperation. The rise of this particular fraud in Nigeria coincided with a boom in cybercafés, a series of economic crashes starting in the 1980s, and devastating youth unemployment. When legitimate paths to prosperity close, illegitimate ones become more attractive.
There's also a cultural dimension. A 2018 study of Nigerian hip-hop found that cyber-fraud is frequently glamorized in popular music. Social media influencers flaunt luxury cars and designer clothes, sometimes openly attributing their wealth to "yahoo yahoo." For young people watching these displays, scamming can appear not just lucrative but cool—a shortcut to a lifestyle that seems otherwise impossible to achieve.
This doesn't excuse the crime. But it does explain how someone might rationalize it, especially when the victims are wealthy foreigners in distant countries and the proceeds buy things the scammer's parents could never afford.
The Evolution Continues
The basic advance-fee template has spawned countless variations.
The "sugar daddy" or "sugar momma" scheme involves someone posing as a wealthy older person seeking companionship. They offer to shower the victim with gifts and money, but first require a small payment to prove trust or cover some administrative expense. The dynamic exploits loneliness as much as greed.
"Money flipping" promises to multiply small investments into large returns through some vaguely described financial mechanism. Send five hundred dollars, get five thousand back. The explanation of how this works is always fuzzy, but the testimonials are enthusiastic.
Romance scams build entire relationships—sometimes lasting months or years—before the inevitable financial emergency requires the victim to send money. The emotional manipulation in these cases can be devastating. Victims lose not just money but their sense of trust in human connection.
Some operations have become genuinely sophisticated, with accomplices stationed in the United States or Europe to meet victims in person, adding a layer of credibility that pure email scams lack. These "closers" step in once initial contact has been made, presenting themselves as intermediaries who can expedite the transaction.
Fighting Back
Governments and organizations have attempted various countermeasures with mixed success.
In 2004, Nigeria established the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission specifically to combat these frauds. Five years later, the Commission announced a partnership with Microsoft to develop "Eagle Claw," a system using artificial intelligence to identify and flag fraudulent emails before they reach potential victims. The goal was to warn a quarter of a million people who might otherwise have been targeted.
Private citizens have developed their own responses. "Scam baiting" involves posing as a gullible victim and stringing scammers along through increasingly absurd correspondence. The goal is to waste the scammer's time—every hour they spend chasing a fake mark is an hour they're not defrauding real victims. Some baiters have convinced scammers to recreate scenes from Monty Python, travel to fake meetings in distant cities, or produce elaborate documentation for transactions that will never occur. Websites like Artists Against 419 maintain databases of known scam sites and work with financial institutions to share intelligence.
But the fundamental problem remains: the transaction structure that makes these scams work is also what makes them nearly impossible to prosecute. Wire transfers through services like Western Union are fast, anonymous, and irreversible. By the time a victim realizes they've been defrauded, the money is gone, the phone numbers are disconnected, and the perpetrators have moved on to new identities and new targets.
The Timeless Human Vulnerability
What's most remarkable about advance-fee fraud is how little the core psychology has changed since the Spanish Prisoner letters of the 1780s.
The scam exploits several deeply human tendencies: the desire for windfall wealth, the willingness to cut corners for profit, the difficulty of admitting we've been fooled, and the irrational hope that persists even as evidence accumulates against it. These aren't weaknesses unique to the gullible or uneducated. Doctors, lawyers, professors, and executives have all fallen victim. The scam works because it targets universal human psychology, not specific demographics.
There's also something to be said about the false intimacy these schemes create. The scammer and victim develop a relationship, exchanging messages over days or weeks, sharing details real and invented. The victim comes to feel they know this person on the other side of the world. That sense of connection makes betrayal harder to recognize and harder to accept.
Every generation believes it's too sophisticated to fall for old tricks. Every generation produces new victims. The technology evolves—from handwritten letters to faxes to emails to social media direct messages—but the human weaknesses remain constant. As long as people want something for nothing, someone will be there to take their money while promising to deliver it.
The Letter from Jerusalem is still being sent. It just has better formatting now.