Transblawg has a translation of the Berlin police report of the capture of a Nigerian fraudster practising the famous 419 fraud. There’s now a growing industry of people pitching for readership by publishing (probably fictional) accounts of how they responded. The Raving Atheist is still my favourite:

The Directors were immensely gratified that you are a Catholic, a circumstance which will allow us, out of mutual trust, to dispense with many of the expensive formalities associated with secular, non-Christian commerce. They do, however, repeat their request that you briefly outline your beliefs (two sentences or less) regarding what it means to say that God is (1) all-powerful, (2) all-knowing, and (3) all-good. As I indicated before, we wish only a short definition of what you mean by each of those three words. For example, with respect to whether God is all-knowing, we wish to know whether you believe that means that God can see only the present and the past, or the future as well.

I actually read many of the scams I receive as a way of keeping up to date with African political history. I’ve recently started receiving mail from Koreans and Vietnamese, but these tend to be less well researched and their authors probably also live in Lagos.

Categories: Roads, Splog, The law court

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1. The Raving Atheist
   November 20th 2003 01:22

   My correspondence was not fictional. Had that been the case it would have been much more interesting and much shorter.

2. Trevor
   November 20th 2003 06:31

   Yep, you were obviously genuine, but there are a lot of epigones out there now who sound less convincing. If enough people do it for real, will the problem go away by itself?

3. kalebeul » Blog Archive » Walter Raleigh and Nigerian scammers
   February 27th 2009 13:00

   [...] you know, the Nigerian 419 fraud and the Nigerian horse scam and the Nigerian red breast scam are descendants of the Spanish [...]