How to Tell If You Are the Victim of a Nigerian Scammer

The Citizen's Advice Bureau reported back in 2014 that roughly 4 million people fall for scams in a single year. Their breakdown of where it happens is telling: about 34% get caught over the phone, 24% while browsing certain websites, 16% through letters that arrive in the mail, and 10% by way of emails, texts, and ads.

Maybe a stranger has phoned you or mailed you asking for money. Maybe the message threatened harm to you or the people you care about, or maybe it went the other direction and poured on affection, calling you the love of their life. Any of those could mean a so-called Nigerian scammer has picked you as a target. What do they actually want? Almost always, your money. Only in rare cases is the goal a genuine relationship or doing physical harm. The whole game rests on earning your trust so the cash can be drained once you let your guard down.

These operators lean on catfishing. They build a mask, often an attractive, clever, well-off persona, and they will never once admit the whole thing is an act. That refusal to come clean is exactly what makes them hard to pin down. Hard, though, is not the same as impossible. A few habits give them away.

Start with the writing. Spelling mistakes and clumsy grammar scattered through a payment request or a love note are a strong signal. Many of these messages come from templates floating around online, but the sender garbles them: words get misspelled, words get dropped from sentences, and whole words get capitalized for no reason no matter where they sit in a line. A typical opener reads something like this: "Attn: Sir/Madam, Re: PAYMENT NOTIFICATION, I am MR OLUKAYODE GUEYE, Director Foreign Affairs Ministry, my office monitor and control affairs of all banks and financial institutions in country concerned with foreign payments/inheritance..."

Then there is the voice. If you end up on a call, listen to the accent. The great majority of these callers have an African accent, and if the person courting you does not sound British, American, German, or French the way they claimed, trust that instinct. Raise it directly. Point out the mismatch between who they say they are and how they sound. If the response is offense or anger rather than an explanation, cut the conversation off and send nothing more.

One caution about numbers: most of these groups disguise their caller ID so the call appears to originate in your own country, or in whatever country their fake identity supposedly comes from. A phone number or an email address proves nothing about who is really on the other end. When the number is not masked, the country code to watch for is 234 or 419.

Be wary when a new admirer seems too perfect, too eager to please. Scammers flood their targets with attention and overflowing affection, and for someone who is lonely after losing a partner, ending a relationship, or watching the last kid move out, that flood can be enough all on its own. They gravitate toward people who crave attention, who are grieving, who are older, who have money, or who live with a disability.

When the pitch is framed as business rather than romance, it usually arrives as a large sum of money dangled in front of you. The story runs that the sender needs help moving funds out of their country, and in exchange for your help you will keep a cut, often described as a million dollars or more. They will claim to hold some official-sounding post inside a government body, complete with impressive titles. It is fake. They may also warn that saying anything to anyone will get them hurt or killed. That is a lie too.

Here is how the money trick actually plays out. The scammer sends you a check and tells you to deposit it, keep your percentage, then wire the rest along to them. You deposit it, pull out the agreed share, and forward the balance. Days later the bank flags the check as fraudulent, but by then your withdrawal is already gone. The bank comes after you for the full amount. Refuse to repay it and you could face jail. Meanwhile the person you were "helping" has vanished, and you never hear from them again.

So what should you do if any of this lands in your inbox, your mailbox, your phone, or a dating-site message? Ignore it. Do not answer the calls, do not reply to the letters or texts or notes. Some people enjoy stringing a scammer along until they give up, a practice sometimes called scam-baiting, but if you are not inclined toward that, silence works fine. Report the attempt to the FBI's fraud division. Under no circumstances keep the conversation going, and never send money or gifts.

References: Citizen's Advice Bureau. (2014). Four million people scammed each year. Federal Bureau of Investigations. (2015). Common fraud schemes.