Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian E-Mail Scam
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Foxnews has an interesting story about the woman who sent $400k to Nigerian scam artists, it is revealing about the psychology of the mark.
An Oregon woman who is out $400,000 after falling for a well-known Internet scam says she wasn't a sucker or an easy mark.
Janella Spears of Sweet Home says she simply became curious when she received an e-mail promising her $20.5 million if she would only help out a long-lost relative identified as J.B. Spears with a little money up front.
Spears told KATU-TV about the scammers' ability to identify her relative by name was persuasive.
"That's what got me to believe it," She said. "So, why wouldn't you send over $100?"
Spears, who is a nursing administrator and CPR teacher, said she mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car, and ran through her husband's retirement account.
"The retirement he was dreaming of -- cruising and going around and seeing America -- is pretty much gone for him right now," she said.
She estimates it will take two years to clear the debt that accumulated in the more than two years she spent sending money to con artists.
Her family and bank officials told her it was all a scam, she said, and begged her to stop, but she persisted because she became obsessed with getting paid.
These Nigerian scams seem unreal - how could anyone fall for this old confidence trick? But there are a couple of interesting facets to this story. First, Ms. Spears believed that the use of her relative's name vouched for the credibility of the con criminal. Second, the payment of $100 was no risk for a large gain. Third, no amount of rational persuasion could knock the idea that she was going to get paid out of her head - even when coming from sensible and reliable people.
I don't have a theory for why this bag of tricks produces this insane result - I suspect I am missing one or two other factors.
But, it is too simple to write these incidents off as merely the combination of greed and stupidity - we have a long way to go to understand the mechanics of these self inflicted frauds. Oh, and how is our understanding of the self inflicted fraud of the credit crunch coming along?
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