: views from the Hill

Friday, April 23, 2004

Scams

I always wonder at folks who fall for scams.

Well, yes, there are some scams and spams that are really clever, like the new ones that claim to be letters from the FDIC asking the recipient to click a link for more information or the one I just tossed from Citibank (even though I don't have a Citibank account) titled Citibank Fraud Verification Process, but the Nigerian scam? Why do I still get so many Nigerian scam e-mails? Nobody could still be falling for that one, could they?

Seems so. Yesterday I read this sad bit in News of the Weird. Seems a seventy-three-year-old guy lost $300K to the Nigerian scam and even after losing all that money, he still blamed his losses on the "corrupt governments" that were plaguing his Nigerian friends, never suspecting that he'd been scammed by his so-called "friends."