419 Frequently Asked Questions;

You may not have heard about 419 fraud before so here is a brief FAQ, if your questions are not answered by the FAQ, please check our links page or email us your queries.

Put simply, 419 is the Nigerian offence code for advance fee fraud, this is not a new scam, years ago the people of west Africa used post and Fax as their preferred medium.

Typically you will be contacted by some sort of official, political prisoner, orphan or refugee and they will invariably have millions of dollars on deposit somewhere that for whatever reason they need to transfer out of their country, other variations include large deposits of gold or other valuables.

They will initially offer you a large percentage of their money in payment for the use of your bank account. The sting shortly follows, there is of course no fund of millions of dollars and you will soon be asked for money for fees, bogus lawyers and bribes.

Sometimes the scammers will try and entice you to a foreign country where they can beat you and rob you.

This is not a joke, 419 advance fee fraud is a multi-million dollar business in Nigeria with some very highly organised gangs of thugs.

Our advice to you is not to contact these people.

How do they operate?

Basically these Lads follow a set script, there are scammers who are involved in the harvest of email addresses, they get most of these from internet guest books and similar places.

The harvested addresses are mass mailed by low level Scammers who filter out the wheat from the chaff, usually they have some stock identification consisting of forged identification and false documents relating to the fund.

After a few emails you usually move up the chain to scammers with a better grasp of English, if you are in correspondence with them you may notice their email address changing from time to time.

They first try to get your identification details and telephone numbers from you and then they systematically try to milk you for fees. This is usually through Western Union transfer because they can steal your money anonymously.

My Scammer pointed me to a bank website!

Disturbingly, some scammers go to the trouble of setting up false banking websites to show you transfer of non-existent funds. Please do not fall into the trap and ask yourself the following questions before you get involved with these people;

WHY HAVE THEY SINGLED ME OUT FROM THE POPULATION OF THE WORLD?

WHY ARE THEY USING A FREE EMAIL ACCOUNT? (YAHOO, HOTMAIL, TISCALI, MAIL.COM, FSMAIL ETC).

IF THEY ARE SO WELL EDUCATED, WHY IS THEIR COMMAND OF ENGLISH SO POOR?

WHY WOULD ANYONE GIVE YOU MILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOR VERY LITTLE WORK?

IF THEY ARE SO RICH WHY ARE THEY SOLICITING THE HELP OF A STRANGER?

And if you need more convincing that the letter is fraudulent, this is an excellent website which explains the scam in great detail;

419 COALITION WEBSITE

There are certain people who decide to play with these scammers and refer to them with sometimes great affection, in the scam-baiters world the scammer is known as a LAD, scam-baiters actively hunt the Lads by posting their email addresses in places frequented by Lads and then proceed to make the scammers do all manner of humiliating things.

Due to the greed of the lads, they will carry out some astounding things just because they believe that they are going to get some easy money, of course the scam-baiter knows this, the Lad thinks he is carrying all the aces but the scam-baiter, knowing that there is in fact no money at all takes great delight in ridiculing the Lad by putting him off his script and wasting his time and money resources.

Most Lads operate out of internet cafes and in their terms, it is very expensive for them to surf so the scam-baiter not only wastes the time of the lads, the scam-baiter keeps the lad from his true victim.

The baiter uses the Lads poor grasp of English to generally make the lad look stupid and some hilarious photographs have been obtained by some of the better scambaiters.

Are Lads Dangerous?

Well, we certainly wouldn't want to meet them in a dark alley, lads occasionally murder the victims that they manage to lure out into foreign countries, also they are more organised than some people would have you believe.

Since we started baiting it has become apparent to us that there are lads operating in many countries of the world including Britain and the US and although it is unlikely that they would waste the time and money to pursue a victim, you should always disguise your identity and NEVER give them your real details if you try baiting, please for your own safety, use your common sense.