EARLIER THIS YEAR, thousands of people checked their e-mail and found a surprise: An American soldier needed help, and there was something in it for them. Their correspondent was a sergeant stationed in Iraq, he explained. He had accumulated millions in hundred-dollar bills—the older ones being phased out by the Treasury—from the cash brought into the country by the American occupation. The soldier needed to launder this money, fast, and needed a stateside bank account to do it. In return for a cut of the total, could he use yours?

Reading this, you’re probably already shaking your head: The message is obviously spam. This electronic missive from a 21st-century war seems like just a new, cynical twist on a scam that’s a hallmark of the Internet era: advance-fee fraud, also known as “419” (for the fraud designation in the Nigerian criminal code) or “Nigerian letter spam.”

Sent out by the tens of thousands to e-mail address lists, 419 messages seek a small investment on the part of the recipient in return for the promise of a huge profit, then create obstacles that require initial investments on the way to the payout—which never quite arrives. Preposterous as the scam seems, it can work. Though many successful 419 scams go unreported, the average take from those we know about is more than $5,000 per American victim, with some losing much more—$600,000 from a Czech retiree, $5.6 million from a US businessman.

The advance-fee scam seems perfectly made for the medium of the Internet, with its anonymity and ability to send thousands of e-mails with a single keystroke. Since the mid-1990s, it has become so common that it is now synonymous with spam for many people—so much so that the “Nigerian prince” serves as a shorthand joke on TV shows like “30 Rock” and “The Office.”


But if the Internet has provided a particularly efficient way to carry out advance-fee scamming, the underlying con is a lot older than most Web users realize. Advance-fee fraud is actually a modern version of the “Spanish Prisoner” con, variations of which have been documented back to the French Revolution. A look back at the con suggests that far from being a testament to the risks of the Internet, it’s a window into much deeper human impulses and fears. The scam tends to arise wherever we assume corruption and confusion are greatest, and its long and twisting story offers a kind of negative portrait of world history—the places over the last few centuries where those fears have most firmly taken root.

The Spanish Prisoner thrives because we all tend to believe that wherever there is instability and corruption in the world, someone is making out like a bandit. Why not us?


***

OVER THE YEARS, the shape of the advance-fee con has become so reliable that you can spot it from the first sentence, as familiar as the 12-bar blues. A message arrives claiming to be from someone in a place of global crisis: the son of a Russian oligarch who needs to liquidate a safe deposit box full of Krugerrands, say, or the wife of a deposed Nigerian politician with decades of graft in Swiss accounts. The plea is set in an environment of real global news, and may allude to a mix of real and fake institutions: AngloGold Corp., Apex Paying Bank, Novokuibyshevsk Oil.

The deal is this: You make a small initial outlay (the advance fee), in exchange for an enormous return. But once you take the bait, things inevitably begin to go wrong. The customs staff changes, new bribes are needed, a key person in the transaction falls ill. Just a little more money, the writer promises, and you’ll make it all back. The longer you play along, the more you fall prey to what economists call the “sunk cost fallacy”—you’ve already put so much money in that it seems crazy to turn back now. By the end, you’re just trying to make back what you’ve lost.

Even the tone of these letters is immediately recognizable. They are written “as fairly well-educated foreigners speak English, with a word misspelled here and there, and an occasional foreign idiom.” That quote isn’t from the last few years: It’s from a New York Times article from 1898, when the Spanish Prisoner scam—minus the computers—had already been running for decades.

I remember this one guy sending also me this type of scam from Nigeria trough skype. I then sent him pictures of people covered in shit and eventually he blocked me

I heard that some of the leaders of Melbourne, Australia's Carlton Crew got hit with this scam. Mick Gatto and perhaps Alphonse Gangitano IIRC it was that.