by Jonte Rhodes

Created on: April 14, 2009

The Nigerian or 419 scam is now one of the most commonly encountered on the internet, and still takes millions of dollars form people all around the world every year despite its infamy. The name Nigerian scam comes form the fact that the scam itself supposedly originates in Nigeria, although in actual fact scams like this have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years.

The number 419 comes from the fact that the Nigerian criminal code for this type of scam is 419, and the scam first became popular there in the late 80s. The reason that this kind of scam started to become widespread was because of the fact that the Nigerian economy was failing, and people needed ways of making money. At first Nigerian businessmen were targeted, and then international businesses, and eventually every single person on the planet through mass emails.

Fortunately there are many easy ways to expose these scams and to avoid falling for them, as well as educating people you know who might be likely to waste their money on one. The scam basically promises a larger sum of money to the intended victim if they first send a smaller amount of money to the senders. This sum of money is usually under the guise of administration costs for releasing the larger sum, (usually millions) to the victim. Of course if the victim does send the money, then the larger sum of money never materializes.

One of the easiest ways of telling that a suspicious email is a scam is that the email address is from a conventional service provider. For example if the email address is something like Bankpresident@aol, then you can be sure that the person sending the email isn't the president of some exotic foreign bank. The vast majority of all big companies will have their own service provider of emails, so that a genuine email would look something more along the lines of BankPresident@BigBank.com. The people sending out scam emails however can't afford their own service names, which is why they use poor imitations of company names with free addresses.

The second easy way to tell that something is definitely fake is that the text will likely have either a lot of spelling mistakes, or a lot of bad grammar. People high up in companies generally know how to spell fairly well in English, and their secretaries do as well. Nigerian scam artists on the other hand generally only have a rudimentary understanding of the language, so spelling mistakes will be common.

Other than the ;language itself, there are also usually

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