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Introduction
"Good day, I wish to approach you with a request that would be of immense benefit to both of us", begins a typical email scam letter that will provide the sender with a stream of income sent by a unknown victim. News stories enumerate the plight of victims: a family in Connecticut lost $71,578, an attorney from Texas defrauded of $185,500, individuals in New Zealand were out $800,000, Bank Noroeste in Brazil lost $242 million to scammers, causing closure of the bank. The common thread in these stories is the belief of people answering the emails that they were engaged in financial transactions with credible businessmen and institutions from around the globe. Scammers succeeded in creating the illusion of inclusion in global financial flows ([3] Appadurai, 1990) with their fluency in the language of international business and parlayed that skill to create a sense of trust in their victims.
Confidence letters addressed to unknown recipients have been a medium for conducting fraudulent financial activities for centuries. They have withstood the test of time, successfully surviving the transition from postal letters to the internet, continuing to entice unsuspecting victims to send money. A subset of advance fee fraud scams, Nigerian Letter scams are the most recent version of the "Spanish Prisoner" letter that some researchers date back to the sixteenth century ([20] Nansen, 2008; [27] Smith, 2009). Today, these electronic versions simultaneously reach thousands of people in developed countries, primarily targeting the USA, the UK, and Western Europe. Attesting to their effectiveness, the Nigerian Letter scam appears regularly on the top ten list of internet frauds reported in the USA in terms of amount of money lost annually ([13] International Crime Complaint Center, various years).
The basic form of the letter and its many variations is a solicitation for help to transfer money from financial accounts in Nigeria or another West African nation to an account in a country in the developed world. In our sample, the amounts varied from US$15 million to over US$400 million. The reward promised to the recipient of the email for assisting in making the transaction is 30-40 percent of the funds transferred, amounting to a minimum of US$4.5 million.
The narrative of the Nigerian Letter scam has one objective:...