"DEAR SIR, MAY I CRAVE YOUR INDULGENCE TO OPEN THIS BUSINESS DISCUSSION BY A FORMAL LETTER OF THIS SORT. MY NAME IS MARIAM ABACHA..."

May 9, 2006 2:02 PM

[419Filter] The Perfect Mark: After losing thousands and being sentenced to prison, John Worley is still convinced the Nigerian governmental officials and their fortune exist.
posted by mowglisambo (50 comments total)

Nice article. There's one born every minute, isn't there?
posted by exogenous at 2:09 PM on May 9, 2006

Hehe. You gotta have a dream, people.
posted by bardic at 2:09 PM on May 9, 2006

It looks like gambling: against the odds, against all sense, the guy keeps looking for easy money while throwing away hard-earned money chunk by chunk. The 419 scammers should look for lists of casino customers, maybe buy lists from Vegas hotels.
posted by pracowity at 2:15 PM on May 9, 2006

Fascinating, and sad. It's really amazing to see the lengths to which people delude themselves, and the effects of greed on otherwise decent folk. Thanks for the post.
posted by dbiedny at 2:20 PM on May 9, 2006

Oh come on, who hasn't been taken in by the Nigerian bank scam once or twice?
posted by mazola at 2:23 PM on May 9, 2006

Everyone has a blind spot or three . . but we have all gotten those emails and I still have a hard time believing that anyone fell for it.

I mean I am incredulous, and at the same time not trying to be judgemental.
posted by Danf at 2:24 PM on May 9, 2006

Hey he fell for the Baby Jeebus crap already. He was an easy mark.
posted by fourcheesemac at 2:26 PM on May 9, 2006

I had a neighbor who got a snail mail letter trying to hook him into the "spanish lottery" scam. He was going to respond, so I sat down with him at a computer and showed him page after page of sites that exposed this and other schemes, along with the info that a non citizen can't collect the El Gordo prize.
In spite of all that, he responded to it anyway, saying that he had to take the risk if there was that much money involved. Some people are just hopeless.
posted by 2sheets at 2:29 PM on May 9, 2006

.
posted by mph at 2:31 PM on May 9, 2006

The thing is, this wasn't just emails. The 419ers were going at this guy pretty hard with phone calls, faxes, fake checks, etc. He was naive, sure, but it's a little more understandable when you realize it wasn't just a series of emails filled with mangled English...
posted by mr_roboto at 2:41 PM on May 9, 2006

he had to take the risk if there was that much money involved.

My conscience is a terrible burden on my wallet.
posted by sonofsamiam at 2:42 PM on May 9, 2006

And he still believed in them in the end. What would it take for someone like that to see that it's a scam? Makes me want to move to Nigeria and start writing some fun emails.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 2:46 PM on May 9, 2006

Ha, the fool. What he doesn't know is that I've already gotten 19% of the $654 million from the kings sons trust fund. Everyone else are just trying to cash in on my fabulous wealth. I'm expecting the cheque to arrive any day now!
posted by blue_beetle at 2:57 PM on May 9, 2006

Maybe they locked him up to protect him from himself...
posted by Ken McE at 3:00 PM on May 9, 2006

.
posted by russilwvong at 3:00 PM on May 9, 2006

And he still believed in them in the end. What would it take for someone like that to see that it's a scam? Makes me want to move to Nigeria and start writing some fun emails.

You know, you don't have to live in Nigeria to do this. Scamming across international borders is easy. In fact, people even do it from Canada from time to time. I remember an article about how some Canadian looked up an old lady with the same last name, and told her she was entitled to thousands and thousands in inheritance, if she could send a few tens of k the scammer's way.

When the old lady went to Wal-Mart to do it, the Wal-Mart employee stopped her and had the police come :P

In fact, you'd be a lot better staying away from Nigeria if you actually wanted to do this.
posted by delmoi at 3:06 PM on May 9, 2006

The thing is, this wasn't just emails. The 419ers were going at this guy pretty hard with phone calls, faxes, fake checks, etc.

That's standard operating procedure once you've hooked a sucker into responding to your spam.
posted by Artw at 3:12 PM on May 9, 2006

It always amazes me who falls hardest for this stuff. A frind of mine, a very internet-savvy teenager, recently fell for the same scam that Joshuak did, even after I explained what a 419 scam was and told him never to trust an anonymous Nigerian.
posted by lekvar at 3:14 PM on May 9, 2006

The thing is, this wasn't just emails. The 419ers were going at this guy pretty hard with phone calls, faxes, fake checks, etc. He was naive, sure, but it's a little more understandable when you realize it wasn't just a series of emails filled with mangled English...

Yeah, but it all started with the mangled English emails that we all receive... He responded to that first feeler to start it all. Once they had him hooked they stepped it up, but why do people actually believe these things are real?

I get offered these 'deals' weekly, I win foreign lotteries constantly - I just don't understand how people actually fall for it.
posted by sycophant at 3:16 PM on May 9, 2006

I just don't understand how people actually fall for it.

They think they're smarter than they really are, and they're desperate to live the life they think they were promised.
posted by aramaic at 3:46 PM on May 9, 2006

Hey he fell for the Baby Jeebus crap already. He was an easy mark.

That's why Utah is the fraud capital of the USA. There's a huge population of demonstrably gullible suckers in the form of members of the Church of Latter Day Saints.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:50 PM on May 9, 2006

It's human nature. Bruce Sterling describes an earlier incarnation of the problem in The Hacker Crackdown (1992):

What, in [Thackeray's] expert opinion, are the worst forms of electronic crime, I ask, consulting my notes. Is it -- credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM bank machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer intrusions? Software viruses? Access-code theft? Records tampering? Software piracy? Pornographic bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable service? It's a long list. By the time I reach the end of it I feel rather depressed.

"Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward over the table, her whole body gone stiff with energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is telephone fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake charities. Boiler-room con operations. You could pay off the national debt with what these guys steal.... They target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and demographics, they rip off the old and the weak." The words come tumbling out of her.

It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud. Grifters, conning people out of money over the phone, have been around for decades. This is where the word "phony" came from!

It's just that it's so much easier now, horribly facilitated by advances in technology and the byzantine structure of the modern phone system. The same professional fraudsters do it over and over, Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense onion-shells of fake companies.... fake holding corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all over the map. They get a phone installed under a false name in an empty safe-house. And then they call-forward everything out of that phone to yet another phone, a phone that may even be in another state. And they don't even pay the charges on their phones; after a month or so, they just split. Set up somewhere else in another Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran phone-crooks. They buy or steal commercial credit card reports, slap them on the PC, have a program pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to charities. A whole subculture living off this, merciless folks on the con.

"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people," Thackeray muses, with a special loathing. "There's just no end to them."

posted by russilwvong at 3:51 PM on May 9, 2006

Please tell me Worley doesn't actually think that any of the Nigerians he dealt with actually had a shred of integrity. Sounds like he's up for another round of shafting by the end of the article. I dearly hope I don't catch whatever brain virus it is that he's got.
posted by telstar at 3:59 PM on May 9, 2006

It's really amazing to see the lengths to which people delude themselves, and the effects of greed on otherwise decent folk.
Pbbbtttthhhht. "Otherwise decent folk" who were willing to defraud others for their own ego and monetary benefit lose their claim to sympathy.
posted by LittleMissCranky at 4:09 PM on May 9, 2006

I think some people just get to a point where they've defended the indefensible to the point that to conceed it was a mistake is to admit to being such a colossal moron that stubborn pride will blinker anything that suggests this could really be the case. For example, witness the people who still defend their decision to have voted for... BLAM!

Arrgh!!

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Whew, that was a close one folks. I caught someone at the keyboard trying to link yet another unrelated thread to politics, but don't worry, we got 'em. You can go about your business in safety.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:18 PM on May 9, 2006

What would it take for someone like that to see that it's a scam? He'd have to lose the arrogance that underlies his failure to believe that one so smart as he could be taken in.
posted by QuietDesperation at 4:46 PM on May 9, 2006

Hmmm. Between the getaway car-driving incident, the Christian psychology, what sounds to me like a pretty scam-like "system" to determine people's personality types (which he was selling to churches etc), and some of those emails, I think this guy may have some pretty deep, uh, issues or something - beyond simple stupidity/gulibility. (IANAP)
Yeah, sad.

Oh, and what a dumbass!
posted by zoinks at 4:49 PM on May 9, 2006

If anyone deserves jailtime, he does. He was willing to defraud other people to get a chunk of that money, consequences be damned. All that bullshit about serving God is pretty transparently false when you borrow money from a patient. Ugh. What a wretch.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 5:05 PM on May 9, 2006

Thanks for bringing that up, zoinks. He was already a quack and a scammer - this just cements it.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 5:05 PM on May 9, 2006

Yeah, but it all started with the mangled English emails that we all receive...

Actually, the first time I ever heard about this scam was in 1996, when an adult student of mine asked me for advice, having received a snail-mail posted letter running the very same scam.

I was extremely skeptical, but that was the first time either of us had heard such an outlandish thing, so we did spend a little time thinking it through, and coming to the conclusion that it was utter bunk.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:20 PM on May 9, 2006

russilwvong quoted Bruce Sterling as writing "It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud. Grifters, conning people out of money over the phone, have been around for decades. This is where the word 'phony' came from!"

Probably not. It much more likely comes from a much older confidence game. See also here and here.
posted by Songdog at 5:34 PM on May 9, 2006

I got burned once in a cafe in Kenya. I was on a college trip and this dude told us an amazing story about being a young med student escaping from Idi Amin's brutal regime. I gave him 20 bucks or so at the end. So did my friend. When we got back to the hotel and told everyone, some of the guides informed us that it was a common scam.

We had actually taped the whole conversation at the cafe, with the con artist's permission because we thought it was so fascinating. When my friend learned that we had been scammed, he was so pissed and ashamed he destroyed the tape. That blew my mind more than getting conned did. I still wish I had a copy of that conversation. I am sure it would be fascinating to listen to today.
posted by vronsky at 5:56 PM on May 9, 2006

Man; with that level of delusion that he was doing the right thing while all along acting like a greedy corrupt asshole, he missed his true calling in politics.
posted by TedW at 6:16 PM on May 9, 2006

BTW, what's with the bizarre, stilted English in the Nigerian (if they're really Nigerian) scam emails? Do the folks over there speak whatever local language and use "school" English in their emails?
posted by pax digita at 6:30 PM on May 9, 2006

pax digita: nigeria's official language is english. however the literacy rate is 68%. that, and the fact that petty crooks aren't the cream of the crop in pretty much every society probably have a lot to do with it.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 6:58 PM on May 9, 2006

Man; with that level of delusion that he was doing the right thing while all along acting like a greedy corrupt asshole, he missed his true calling in politics.

Worley and the Shrub. Separated at birth?
posted by telstar at 7:15 PM on May 9, 2006

So, reading the New Yorker article I noticed the prosecuter in the case was pushing really hard to paint Worley as the bad guy: ".. the puppeteer, not the puppet.."

So I decided to Google Nadine Pellegrini, and low and behold: BonsaiKitten pops up. Somebody is pushing hard for a promotion.

Not that I think Worley isn't a bit guilty himself, Worley’s Identity Discovery Profile sounds rather like a free personality test another organization offers.
posted by formless at 7:40 PM on May 9, 2006

It's been a while since anyone has posted a link to 419 Eater.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:51 PM on May 9, 2006

You would think incidents like this would be rare, but (without giving too many details away) I know of a college president who got caught up in one of these things, and even announced to the press that the college was getting something like 20 million dollars. It was on TV for weeks.

Alas, the board of trustees finally figured out that it was just a 419 scam and the guy was fired while the press now had a new story to cover.
posted by UseyurBrain at 7:58 PM on May 9, 2006

TedW, that's not really the same thing on the scam-o-meter, because you were never taken up with the desire to continue with something you knew, or believed, would be harmful to a third party you and your con artist would both be ripping off. You were gullible, but not culpable.

This dude needs to spend time in a Nigerian prison.
posted by fourcheesemac at 8:56 PM on May 9, 2006

Anyways, the best con artists know how to spot a person with a psychological weakness that can be exploited, and as they master the medium -- here email -- they get better and better at finding it, and digging right in. You are either the kind of person who has a hidden soft spot for this shit or you are not, probably a set of specific personality disorder symptoms that go along with it, etc. What never changes are the lures -- money and sex. Some of the best of these cats pretend to be chicks and make people fall in love with them (or the picture they take of their niece or cut from a magazine and scan) over email until they get a money order for airfare to fly them to daddy.

Seriously.
posted by fourcheesemac at 9:00 PM on May 9, 2006

probably a set of specific personality disorder symptoms that go along with it

I think that would depend. Conning old ladies' retirement savings face-to-face is very different to conning a faceless citizen of a rich country via the internet, when one lives in one of the world's poorest countries.

In fact, I am sure I have read articles about Nigerian scammers where they use exactly that kind of justification, ranging from "they're so rich & we're so poor & they probably have heaps more anyway" to some kind of pseudo-leftist "colonialism / globalisation in reverse" argument.
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:31 AM on May 10, 2006

What zoinks said, the was already a scammer -
but only if Mbote reimbursed him for lost wages. Worley set the price at thirty-five thousand dollars a week.
posted by Joeforking at 12:32 AM on May 10, 2006

The song mentioned in the article "Oyinbo, I Go Chop your Dollar" ("White Man, I will eat your dollar") is actually quite good (16 MB quicktime video download here.) Remember this is from a Nigerian comedian, Osuofia, and was used in a local film, it is not really advocating 419 scams.

A few years back I was working at a newspaper owned by Russians. When I mentioned doing a story on 419 scammers in Eastern Europe, almost everybody on the Russian staff admitted to knowing somebody who had involved themselves with one of these scams. It really worked well in East Europe where the connection with wanting money and being rich was never very well established.
posted by zaelic at 4:35 AM on May 10, 2006

All idiots aside, the banks are still part of the problem. That a Fleet bank 'novice' teller is able to let $95k slip into the system - and then immediately out to a Latvian bank - that's negligence.

All of this could have been caught at the bank level.
posted by bhance at 6:24 AM on May 10, 2006

Here is Worley's Identity Discovery Profile. Unfortunately they want to charge me $40 to get my results, the jerks. Sounds like a scam to me....
posted by jrb223 at 6:51 AM on May 10, 2006

What will happen now?

1: Worley will be a total pudding-head to the end of his life, never learns anything in prison, will live a burden to the society, never repaying his debt, dying at 82 of cheap food poisoning.

2: Worley will finish his two terms of crime college a wiser man and spurred by the remorse will repay the $600,000 in the next 18 months, earning a couple of millions more for himself in an undisclosed manner. Will die of gunshot at 76.

3: Worley reemerges from prison a holy man, begins working hard right away, repaying his debt in 15 years and dying a peaceful death, reconciled with the world.

Please help. Which is most realistic?
posted by Laotic at 8:17 AM on May 10, 2006

You'll never con an Honest John
An Honest John you can't drag down
posted by Busy Old Fool at 8:29 AM on May 10, 2006

2: Worley will finish his two terms of crime college a wiser man and spurred by the remorse will repay the $600,000 in the next 18 months, earning a couple of millions more for himself in an undisclosed manner. Will die of gunshot at 76.

With he and the wife playing the victim card to such a degree in that article, it wouldn't be surprising to me if he spent those 2 years putting together a bunch of notes to hand off to a ghost-writer to decry the state of the modern justice system. He'll then be able to use his residual checks to pay off what he owes the system, if he doesn't feel too entitled by his one-man dumbo revolution.
posted by thanotopsis at 10:50 AM on May 10, 2006

What happened to the $600k?
posted by delmoi at 11:13 AM on May 10, 2006