I started collecting those wonderful Nigerian letters and emails soliciting your co-operation to smuggle huge amounts of money out of the country. I thought that maybe the collection might provide an opportunity for analysis and crafting some sort of paper. Over the past few years the stories have gotten more and more complex. A couple years ago there was even a spoof site that fashioned itself as a Nigerian college for these get-rich-quick spammers. There have been countless news stories about hard luck cases that have fallen for these scams and ended up bilked in the process. I seem to recall that there was even people traveling to various airports to actually meet their ‘business associates.’ The point is, the fact that these things are a scam would seem to be a similarly widespread understanding. yet people seem to still be led by their greed into losing more and more money to these schemes. And then news today that a county treasurer in Michigan not only managed to lose $72K of his own money, but also managed to embezzle a further $1.2M of his county funds. Will it never end?
