Last May, Strategic Policy reported on a proliferation of illegal schemes — delivered by letter or e-mail under dozens of false names — which offer unwitting investors the opportunity to make millions of dollars simply by assisting in the electronic transfer of funds out of the West African country of Nigeria.
The unsolicited offers are, of course, bogus. In fact, many Americans who made the mistake of responding to these invitations have seen their bank accounts plundered by the Nigerian con artists perpetrating these crimes.
Now, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other American law security agencies are working to combat a new twist on the Nigerian scam: A boondoggle that purports to be an appeal from the son of a slain white farmer in Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwean scam targets its victims with e-mail messages from someone named David Udiata, who claims to be a farmer whose father was killed in the recent land disputes under Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned farms.
“I got your letter through [the] network online,” claims the message, using a format similar to a scam known as the Internet Nigerian Letter Scheme.
It goes on to ask for the victim’s assistance in transferring $8.5 million to a bank account in South Africa. It promises a big reward to the victim, who must first provide access to a personal bank account.
The scam artists then help themselves to a few thousand dollars from the victim’s bank account.
The Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC), a Washington-based law enforcement agency operating under the auspices of the FBI, has received more than 600 complaints regarding the Internet Nigerian Letter Scheme since May 2000, according to its Web site. Only two of the complaints involved a loss of money, a total of $31,000. The Zimbabwean scam is a new approach to the old Nigerian schemes, but the perpetrators are equally elusive.
“We try to prosecute whenever possible,” says FBI public affairs spokeswoman Julie Miller. “It’s hard to find willing [district] attorneys, though.”
Under both the Nigerian and Zimbabwean schemes, a large sum of money that needs to be transferred to a foreign account is always involved, and the subjects tend to present themselves as bank officials, persons of stature or family members of rich, deceased individuals.
As with other West African ‘wire frauds,’ a large sum of money is offered as a reward.
The victims give a phone number and e-mail address at which they can be contacted.
The FBI’s Miller says that, once contacted, “[The perpetrators] ask the individual either to give them access to his or her personal bank account or to open a new account which, in order to be established, must have an initial deposit of $15,000 and up.”
The Secret Service has established a special unit to track the Nigerian fraud cases. The Service’s Financial Crime’s Division receives 100 calls a day from people hoodwinked by Nigerian scam artists.
“The American government is really powerless to stop these scams,” says a State Department official interviewed by Strategic Policy last May. “It’s the Nigerian government that can really put a stop to it — but they don’t. Either because they personally benefit from the rip-offs, or because they take a sort of perverse pride in pulling one over on us Americans.”
The State Department official, when contacted to comment on this article, also believes President Mugabe is equally capable of stopping the Zimbabwean criminals.
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