OSF - 2.25 - scams - advance fee
In calling it advance fee fraud I'm trying to use the most neutral term here. It's also the most descriptive. These scams (and there are a great many variations on this scam) relies upon getting people to pay you money, in advance, with the promise that they will receive an enormous return, at a later date.
No, this isn't an investor scam, but it does tend to turn on the same theme and idea.
But this scam also has a number of other names. Most people would know it as the Nigerian scam. It is also known as the 419 scam, which is a reference to the section of the Nigerian criminal code that makes this type of scam illegal.
They sent me to teach in Nigeria. (Twice. I think they were trying to kill me.) Do not joke about the Nigerian scam, if you are in Nigeria. They don't have any sense of humour about it. After all, how would you feel, say, as an American, if people started talking about an American prince or other leader and rich person, who promised people lots of money, or possibly that they would provide them with favorable new regulations and relief from taxation or tariffs, as long as they sent him a bit of money now, say, investing in his corrupt and fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme, and referring to it as "the American scam?" You probably wouldn't like it either.
Fortunately, I was an invited speaker to the First International Conference on Advance Fee Fraud, which was arranged by the Nigerian government. When I informed the class in classes in Nigeria about this, then they were okay with it, and we could have a reasonable discussion of the fraud. But they don't like it being called the Nigerian scam, for obvious reasons.
So, I will use an even older name for it: The Spanish Prisoner Scam. For all I know that there are even older versions of it, dating back to the Peloponnesian war, or even the Trojan war. But I'll stick with the Spanish Prisoner scam.
So, in that version, you would probably receive a letter telling you this story, that a knight, eager for riches and glory, had left his vast estates, and headed out to the Holy Land for the Crusades. He did, indeed, cover himself with glory, and obtain great riches, in the ensuing crusade. However, on the way home, somehow he ended up in Spain, and was taken prisoner. (Spain, at this time, was frequently under Moorish control, and the Moors couldn't be expected to have much sympathy with someone on the Christian side of the Crusades.) He is being held for ransom. If you will send the money to pay his ransom, you will be richly rewarded, many times over, when he gets home to his vast states, and great wealth, and the enormous additional wealth that he has piled up from his activities during the crusade.
See? You pay a fee, for something, now (the ransom), and you will be richly rewarded later, many times over and above the fee that you are paying for the ransom. This is the basis of the advance fee fraud.
During the 20th century, a lot of people were receiving letters from Nigerian princes, or people who were head of the Nigerian oil development department, or various other entities, probably based on the fact that nobody was really terribly familiar with the country of Nigeria anyway. That's how it came to be called the Nigerian scam in recent years.
With the classic advance fee fraud, involving somebody in a foreign country, generally speaking there is a request to help pay the financial transfer fees. This may be fairly small, perhaps as small as $1,000. However, after paying that initial fee, then there will be some other difficulty: possibly some additional financial banking fee that needs to be paid before the transfer can be completed. This time the fee is possibly $2,000. And then there is another fee, and another, generally increasing every time. Over time, of course, you end up paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the reason that people end up paying this amount of money is, once again, social engineering. Once you have invested a certain amount of money, confirmation bias and other psychological factors tend to kick in, and you become prey to the "sunk cost fallacy." You have already paid a certain amount of money, you have invested in this process or scheme or project, and so therefore, it stands to reason that you need to continue paying, in order to get your massive reward at the end. It becomes harder and harder to convince people who are involved in this that the massive reward at the end does not, in fact, exist.
I actually received a printed letter version of the scam in the distant past, and I wish I had held onto it over the years. It was fancy, with embossed and gilded letterhead. Email scammers don't have to go to the same lengths these days, although some do.
This illustration is a kind of variation on the theme: you have won a huge prize, and just have to pay an administrative fee to get it released. These guys obviously feel that having graphics and logos (and even a barcode! It *must* be official!) and looking impressive will distract people from the flaws in this letter. (Again, we'll go into these ones in details when we get to the "spotting spam" topics.)
There are an enormous number of variations on this. There may be a rich prince from a foreign country. There may be somebody who is the head of some development corporation, with access to large amounts of cash. There may be the wife of some political figure, usually now a widow. Generally speaking there is some kind of a sob story associated with it. Very often the people involved are trying to move their vast fortune out of the country in which they currently reside, and are asking for your help in paying financial transaction fees in order to do so. Or, sometimes, they simply want to use your bank account in order to transfer their great wealth into your bank account, and then you will pay them the bulk of their fortune, once they get out of the country, retaining a large percentage of it as a payment for your help in this matter. The stories are endless, and, most recently, have turned on vast fortunes that the holder wishes to donate to charity, but is being prevented from doing so by the evil government in their country, and this is why they need to get their Fortune out of the country and need your bank account in order to do it.
As I say, the stories are endless. But they all have the one central theme: somebody needs you to pay money now, and you will be paid back, and richly rewarded, at some future date.
I have recently found a minor variation on this theme. Once again, as with the grandparents scam, and various others, this involved gifts cards. Somebody will contact you, and ask if you do business with Amazon, or if you can help them out with some matter, and, once you have replied to the initial message, (and there is some additional social engineering involved here: when you have replied to the message, you have a tendency to believe that you are part of the ongoing transaction, and you have a greater propensity to go along with their further requests), then in a subsequent message they will say that they are trying to reward some people in a charity, or an organization, and they are asking your help, because they would like to get gift cards, but are not currently in town, and so would you go and buy gift cards for them, and keep some of the cards for yourself, and they will of course pay the entire bill. Later.
So, sometimes advance fee frauds are relying upon people's greed. Or, sometimes they are relying on people's wish to help in a difficult situation. Or, sometimes they are based on people's wish to aid in a charitable endeavor. Like I say, the variations on the scam seem to be endless.
Because of the promise of a reward at the end of the process, there is a regrettable propensity, on the part of law enforcement personnel and agencies, to consider that "you can't cheat an honest man," and that victims of advanced fee scams are at fault in the matter. In some cases, there may be some validity in this. But this does not take into account the skill in social engineering that goes into a great many of these frauds. As I say, many times the appeal will not necessarily be solely to the reward that the person will receive. Often times the story will concentrate on the sufferings of the person who is in distress, and wants to transfer money. Or, sometimes the version of the advanced be fraud will emphasize a charitable endeavor that is to be established once the funds are transferred. One of the extremely common versions of this scam that I have seen, for many years, in my spam collection email accounts, talk about transferring money to your bank account, so that that you can then retransfer this money to people who are either an established charity, or are setting up some kind of charitable institution. In this case, of course, you may not necessarily be asked to pay upfront fees, but, of course, in giving access to your bank account as a repository for these funds, your bank account may be drained. In another version of this bank account sub-variant of the scam, an actual deposit may be made to your account, and you then transfer out the bulk of that money to another account, and only then, with the machinations and clearances involved in bank transfers, does it become apparent that the original deposit to your account was, in fact, faulty, and no money has been deposited to your account, and you can't get the money back that you transferred out of your account, because you did that transfer legitimately, and the bank can't get your money back because the account you transferred the money to has now been closed down, and so you owe the bank the amount of that transfer. (See discussions of how these scams are organized.)
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/online-scams-frauds-and-other-attacks.html
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