"419" Scam – Advance Fee / Fake Lottery Scam

Typically, victims of the scam are promised a lottery win (example) or a large sum of money sitting in a bank account or in a deposit box at a security company. Often the storyline involves a family member of a former member of government of an African country, a ministerial official, an orphan or widow of a rich businessman, etc. Here is an example. Variants of the plot involving the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Iraq, Kuwait, UAE, Mauritius, etc. are also known. Some emails include pictures of boxes stuffed with dollar bills, scans of fake passports, bank or government documents and pictures of supposedly the sender.

Though most of these scams use emails sent in English, we also come across emails translated into French, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish and Czech, Indonesian, as well as English and French letters by postal mail, usually mailed from Spain.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s (for this is nothing new!) the main vehicle for this scam were fax machines.

The victims are promised a fortune for providing a bank account to transfer the money to. Then - if they fall for the scam - they are made to part with thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in "bribes" for local officials or other "fees" (taxes, insurance, legal fees, etc) before the "partners" finally disappear without trace. Here are some typical examples of advance fee demands.

Sometimes fraudulent cashier's checks are issued to the victims, who are asked to wire funds for various charges after the bank says funds are "available" from the check, but before the check has actually cleared. Any transaction that involves cashing a check for a third party and then forwarding funds from it to another person you don't know is almost guaranteed to be a scam.

You can read the full article at our friends website www.419scam.org/419scam.htm who is the source of this great information!