But when you do, you go to Norway or Denmark because the worldwide supply of suckers is inexhaustible:
Everyone who uses the internet has at some point encountered a Nigerian scam. Some are openly Nigerian—like the infamous “A Nigerian prince just died and we need to send his fortune to a safehaven overseas and if you agree to accept this payment you will be paid $4.3 million for the service, which all makes perfect sense I promise” email. Some are run out of Nigeria but don’t mention the country specifically—like an email responding to your Craigslist couch-selling ad that offers, in odd-sounding English, to pay you exactly what you asked for (the scam is that they send you way more than the price “by accident” and then ask you to wire them back the excess—the money they sent appears to actually be in your account so you send them the excess. Then a couple weeks later, the bank realizes it was a fake check and you’re on the hook for all of it…but the “excess” money you wired was real money and the scammer has taken it and disappeared).19 Things I Learned in Nigeria | Wait But Why:
I came to Nigeria excited to learn more about the people who run these scams so asked a bunch of questions. Apparently, Nigerian people call these scammers “Yahoos” (pronounced “ya-OOZE”) because they always used Yahoo to carry out their scams, back when Yahoo was something humans used. And word is that they don’t bother scamming Americans much anymore because Americans no longer tend to fall for the tricks—instead, they’ve moved onto Denmark and Norway, two places where they’re having great success now. I learned that one scam that’s hot right now is convincing some poor lonely Danish man that you’re a pretty American girl (by creating a fake Facebook account and stealing photos from some random other Facebook account), spending a couple months forming a relationship with the man, and then asking the man to send money for a flight so you can come visit him. Which he does and then never hears from you again. They even have a machine that makes a man’s voice sound like a woman’s, which they use to talk to the man on the phone. Good, honest work.
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