I was checking the latest posts on my favorite newsgroups and there was a message from one of the regular group members about how he was thinking about taking advantage of some opportunity that he heard about on one of his other newsgroups. Being that Id known this person for quite a while (at least online) I decided that I would follow his link and see what sort of opportunity he was talking about.

Ok, so Id known (well call him) John for about four years. Being that we both belonged to several engineering related online communities, Id had John pegged as a pretty smart guy. But I guess intelligence and knowledge dont always go hand in hand. Apparently there are still people out there that are not aware of the Nigerian Scam. Go figure.

For those of you who are still in the dark about one of the oldest known advance fee types of scams, thats what it is. The Nigerian Scam is a type of advance fee fraud that involves tricking someone using their confidence against them. The basic lure is the promise of great amounts of money if the target will invest relatively small amounts of money.

Though the Nigerian Letter was initially transmitted mostly via fax, it is now replicated throughout cyberspace via email and other avenues such as newsgroups and discussion boards. There is typically some mention of needing to transfer huge sums of money out of the senders country. Often such a letter will invite recipients to impersonate a beneficiary of a large unclaimed estate.

A close cousin to the Nigerian Letter Scam is The Spanish Prisoner scam were the mark is told that a wealthy person needs assistance in transferring ransom funds. Invitees are told that they will be receiving some percentage of a large amount of money if they help. Of course somewhere in there the target is asked to transfer money of his or her own and will be paid back several times over once the prisoner is released.

Check out http://UrgentMessage.org for an updated database of popular scams being propagated via the net. Also, take a look at http://aa419.org for a list of fake bank websites that are used in various schemes involving money transfer.