Nigerian E-mail Scams Hit Southern Oregon Government Officials
Thursday, February 23, 2006
STEVE WOODWARD The Oregonian

(Note:Forward or Printout for all older people you know. Make them read this. Apparently a lot of people are still not aware.)

"Dear Reader,

"I am Steve Woodward, the son of the late Chief Bola Ige Woodward, attorney general of the federal republic of Nigeria who was killed by hired assassins. Before he died, my father revealed to me he Deposited a Trunk Box containing $9.5M (Nine million, Five Hundred Thousand US dollars) with a Security and Finance Company overseas.

"I am now contacting you as a foreigner to assist me in retrieving the Boxes and subsequently Deposit of the funds into your foreign account. I hope you understand our predicament so as to save me and my family from hopeless future."

And if you believe that, I'd be delighted to throw in the Burnside Bridge for an additional $10,000 down payment.

You've just been scammed, Nigerian-style.

But, of course, you probably knew that. An estimated 250,000 scammers each day send so-called Nigerian scam letters to thousands of fax machines and e-mail addresses worldwide. Most recipients find the letters so transparently fraudulent that they trash them without a second thought.

But not three city councilmen in a Southern Oregon town who thought they could make up the town's deficits by cutting a deal with representatives of the "Nigerian Petroleum Company." When their travel agent learned they were flying to Nigeria to consummate the deal, she pronounced them idiots and put them on speaker phone with officials of the Oregon Attorney General's office, who talked them out of going.

Jan Margosian, a spokeswoman for the (Oregon) State Department of Justice, says she can't reveal the names of the councilmen or the town. But she says they are hardly alone. A Portland dentist gave scammers his debit card, Margosian says, only to lose nearly $100,000. A kindhearted state manager, answering an e-mail plea from alleged suffering Nigerian farmers, quit her job of 25 years, sold her home and cars, borrowed money from relatives and lost it all.

"She went to London maybe twice," Margosian says, "and she is so lucky she was not killed."

In 1995, an American businessman, in fact, was murdered in Nigeria while pursuing a scam, according to the U.S. Secret Service, which is the federal agency charged with investigating such scams. Others have been beaten or held against their will.

In a typical scam, a widow of a high government official discovers that her husband has stashed millions of dollars in inaccessible foreign accounts. She urgently -- and confidentially -- needs your help to transfer the money into the United States by using your personal bank account. The scam comes as you fork over a never-ending stream of taxes, attorney fees, transaction fees or bribes.

There are countless variations.

Just ask Philip J. Witham, a Portland electronic engineer who, over the last two years, has collected about 150 letters purporting to be from more than two dozen countries. Although he received his first scam letter 12 years ago via air mail, Witham didn't start collecting them until he heard members of the Portland Cacophony Society reading scam e-mail and other spam at a public poetry reading.

"These would make great dramatic reading -- you know, play the part of the desperate character portrayed in the 419 scam mail," Witham says, referring to Section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, which outlaws such schemes.

Witham's patience paid off Saturday, when he got his chance to read from his collected works. Cacophony Society members once again gathered for dramatic renditions of their in-boxes during an open-mike poetry reading and didgeridoo groove performance by Vivid Curve at Roots Organic Brewing in Southeast Portland. (See interesting didgeridoo info below.)

The desperate -- and presumably fictional -- characters in Witham's e-mail collection include an Ivory Coast prince, the son of the chairman of Sierra Leone Gold Mining Corp. and the deputy minister of provincial and local government of the Republic of South Africa.

"I've even been personally contacted by Kojo Annan, the son of the United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan," Witham writes in an e-mail to The Oregonian. "I am also urgently needed in transactions between OPEC and the World Bank! Fancy that."

Think of it as Nigeria's contribution to comedy, Witham adds. "It might be well worth the cost, overall, when you consider how many laughs we get from it, and you can think of it as a tax on gullibility."

One decidedly skeptical Lake Oswego (Oregon) man got the last laugh, helping bust three Nigerian scam rings for the Secret Service and one for Scotland Yard.

"Several years ago," says inventor and former musician Buzz Siler, "I got a fax at the office that was so ridiculous that essentially I decided, 'I'm going to write back and play along.' "

In 2000, after playing cat-and-mouse with the scammer for months, Siler went underground for the Secret Service. The Houston office of the Secret Service provided him with a rented hotel room, a lamp bearing a hidden video camera and a wired agent who posed as Siler's girlfriend. Some agents impersonated hotel employees, and others waited next door, wearing flak jackets and carrying guns.

"I was new at it," says Siler, better known as the creator of products such as Spajamas spa covers, Ski-Gee ski-goggle wipers and BioHoop vomit bags for ambulances. "But I was an entertainer for a long time. I was used to having butterflies in my stomach."

The Houston scammer arrived at the hotel with two trunks filled with what turned out to be $25 million in counterfeit cash -- all marked with the word "Unnegotiable." The Nigerian explained that he would need $34,000 from Siler's checking account -- $14,000 to buy special ink to erase the word "Unnegotiable" and $20,000 to pay off the diplomatic carriers who brought the trunks into the country.

Siler handed him the checks, written on his personal account.

The Secret Service agents burst in and arrested the Nigerian, who was imprisoned and later deported.

Siler participated in two more undercover operations, in Atlanta, and testified in a London trial before his wife asked him to end his cloak-and-dagger career.

"I still get at least one Nigerian scam letter a week," Siler says. "Obviously the Nigerians don't read."

Unfortunately, neither do many others who have fallen for the scam. Marilyn Dyrud, a communications professor at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls, grew angry as she learned how many people fell victim to the letters' appeals to pity, trust and greed.

She has asked students in her business correspondence class to analyze scam letters for such elements as persuasive strategies, target audience, language use and subject lines. She is asking another class to research some of the Nigerian scam stories as part of an Internet fraud lesson.

She says her students find it hard to believe that people can be so gullible.

"In America, however, the potential of instant wealth is embedded in our cultural mythology," Dyrud writes in an analysis of Nigerian scam letters presented at the Association for Business Communication's 2005 convention.

"There's always the chance of winning the lottery or of a windfall inheritance from that eccentric uncle who has stashed thousands of dollars in coffee cans neatly stacked in his basement," she continues. "It is not stupidity that Nigerian scammers prey upon. It is hope."

Steve Woodward http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/living/1140567987139290.xml?oregonian?lvls&coll=7

Note: The didgeridoo (or didjeridu) is a unique wind instrument of the Australian Aborigines of northern Australia. It is sometimes described as a natural wooden trumpet or "drone pipe". Musicologists classify it as an aerophone. ---also has been medically tested to help reduce snoring and sleep apnea, as well as daytime sleepiness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didgeridoo