

Nigerian scammer nets $40.5 million in 15 months - tshtf
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB124122575455379423.html

======
newac
I'm using a new alias, for obvious reasons, since after reading this article I
realized that we were almost conned by this.

It seems that they work not only via the email lists, but also through
craigslist.org.

Here is what happened. My wife was looking for an accounting position and saw
a post in craigslist.org. She sent her resume and got the response below.
Note: in the response below they are even offering a salary of $1800 per
month. I was really confused by this and seemed shady so we didn't pursue, but
just a warning to all the folks.

 _Company Name ; AXM GROUP LTD

Detailed Job Description – Accounting Assistant

The primary goal of the Accounting Assistant is to provide local customer
support to our clients within North America. This includes providing
convenient payment options and informing them of shipping and the terms of
sale.

You will be assisting our clients within North America, the assistance to be
provided will include: payment collections and customer service via email.

Your duties will include: \- Collecting Local Payments When a buyer in the US
decides to purchase an item through an online auction from our sellers he has
the following payment options: pay pal, international wire transfer,
international check, local certified check or local wire transfer. The
quickest option of these is local wire transferring. Local wire transfers and
certified checks are the options that the sales support representative will
provide to the clients.

\- Managing Data Along with the payments received from buyers you will be
receiving details for these sales. These details will include items sold,
price, and buyer's information. You are to file and maintain these purchasing
records and transactions.

\- Forwarding of the Payments Once you receive each payment you will be
keeping 5% as commission and forwarding the rest to the seller or
representative, whose information will be provided prior each transaction. It
is crucial to complete forwarding of the payments in a time efficient manner.

\- Correspondence You will be submitting brief reports, weekly reports, and
monthly reports. Weekly and monthly reports are to be done in Excel format and
are to summarize all transactions completed within the week, or month.

Here is an example of a brief report:

Date: August 2, '09 Buyer: John R. Smith Item: Jowissa Men's Watch Price: $
1,921.27 Commission 5%: $96 Fees: $ 75 Total Forwarded: $1750.9 Forwarded to:
Godwin Newton, Whitefield ,United Kingdom Reference Numbers: 23497839

\- Fees, and Transferring Procedures All fees are covered by the company. The
fees for transferring are simply deducted from the payments received. No
client will contact you during initial stage of the trial period. After three
weeks of the trial period you will begin to have contact with the buyers via
email in regards to collection of the payments. For the first three weeks you
will simply receive all of the transferring details, and payments, along with
step by step guidance from your supervisor. You will be forwarding the
received payments through wire service.

-Salary During the trial period, you will be paid 1,800USD per month while working on average 3hours per day, Monday-Friday, plus 5% commission from every payment received and forwarded. After the trial period your base pay salary will go up to 2,400USD per month, plus 5% commission.

-Taxes You will receive a monthly invoice stating your total income. All applicable taxes are covered by the company.

\- To Apply Kindly fill out your personal information below for immediate
consideration of this position so you can get started as soon as possible

Personal Information Full Name : Full Address: City: State: Zip/Postal code:
Home phone : Cell phone: Recent occupation: Gender: Personal Email Address:

The employee,acknowledged the Trial and Detailed Job Description and signed
_______________ (First Name and Last Name of Employee)_

------
henrikschroder
_Investigators in the U.K. who are tracking him note that, since Dec. 1, 2008,
Macjon has targeted 13.5 million Americans with the work-at-home e-mail scam.
Investigators estimate his success rate at around 0.1%. That's 13,500 victims
from whom he's stolen as much as $40.5 million._

Oh, the title is pure guesswork. That big, big number is essentially pulled
out of thin air.

 _Frighteningly, Macjon is merely one of about 100 modern-day 419ers plying
the trade._

Seriously? This must be a much larger "industry"? Maybe the successful ones
are that few, but there's got to be tens of thousands trying their hand at it
at least?

 _He and the others buy American e-mail address lists from about a dozen U.S.
based "lead sellers."_

What? Do these companies operate in the open? I was under the impression that
the botnet owners that do harvest email addresses were purely criminal
organizations?

 _The U.S. Secret Service, which used to aggressively track Nigerian scammers,
no longer updates its database of 419 scam letters as regularly, owing to
budgetary constraints and manpower issues._

Or, perhaps, the explosion of the scam industry and the increased
sophistication of the tools make it completely useless to keep a database of
scam letters? I admit I'm not keeping up-to-date with email scams, the
spamfilters are winning the fight for me, but it sounds like this article is
horribly out of date or popularized, and if so, what's it doing on here?

Or am I wrong? Are there only actually a small number of email scammers in
Nigeria? Do they get their email addresses from a handful of legit companies?

~~~
moe
_Investigators estimate his success rate at around 0.1%. That's 13,500 victims
from whom he's stolen as much as $40.5 million._

 _Oh, the title is pure guesswork. That big, big number is essentially pulled
out of thin air._

I'd say more out of a thin butt. According to these figures he on average
extracted $3000 USD out of 30 people, every _day_. If making $90k in profit
per day is really as easy as sending out 13.5 million e-mails then I think I
should seriously reconsider my business plan...

------
shrike
We all spend days designing web forms that won't scare away customers, page
designs that keep important content above the fold, bits of CSS to deal with
buggy browsers, and rewrite the same sentence in an email template 20 times
before we will send it all in an effort to woo the same people who fall for a
419 scam.

What can we take from the `success` of this guy and apply to our businesses?

~~~
weaksauce
Probably that the 80% solution to a problem is probably good enough. Though, a
lot of business does not target that large of an audience which make the 419
scammer economics work.

------
Judson
I'm surprised this wasn't thrown out as an idea in a recent Ask HN post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171520>

