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Everyone has seen advance fee frauds, such as the ‘Nigerian con’. These scammers contact you, usually by email, offering a share in a large sum of money that they wish to transfer out of their homeland.
They may tell you about money trapped in central banks during civil wars or coups (often in countries currently in the news), or massive inheritances that are difficult to access because of government policy in an African or South American country. It seems such a huge windfall that some people are prepared to risk getting involved.
Scammers ask you to provide money or your bank account details to facilitate this process. The victim is then asked to pay fees, charges or taxes to help release or transfer the money out of the country via the victim’s bank. These may start out as small amounts, and gradually get larger as the victim becomes entangled in the scam. As the victim gets deeper into the scam they become more desperate to get the ‘large sum’ having spent much of their savings on the fees and charges.
Advance Fee Fraud is the second most common scam reported to consumer agencies. We get dozens of calls and complaints about these scams every month. They are very cheap to send out, especially by e-mail, and it only needs a few people to respond for it to be worth the scammer’s effort.
While most consumers are calling consumer agencies to report a scam, or to check whether the letter or e-mail is a scam, a small number of people fall for these scams and actually send money overseas. On occasion, the losses to an individual are in the many thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Losses worldwide to these schemes have been estimated in the billions of dollars.
Scammers ask you to provide money or your bank account details. Don’t even think about handing over this sort of information to someone you don’t know or trust.
Sniff test:
Don’t rush into decisions.
Be extremely wary of sending money overseas as it is very hard for law enforcement agencies to track money once it has left the country.
Do some research on the Net, and see what people are saying about the names in this e-mail or letter.
The most effective way to stop these scams being sent is for consumers to not respond to them. If no-one responds they will soon die out. That’s why we are continually educating consumers about these scams and encouraging them to bin or delete them without responding.
Of course, we would investigate any advance fee fraud that is traced to our jurisdiction. At the same time, we work with similar agencies overseas to share information about scams so that they can take enforcement action against scammers targeting Australians from overseas.
