Uncle John’s True Crime (38 page)

When Uncle John checked his e-mail this morning, he found one from someone claiming to need help moving millions of dollars out of their country. Sound familiar? Here’s some background info on one of the most popular Internet scams of all time
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YOU’VE GOT MAIL

If you’re online, there’s a very good chance that an e-mail similar to this one may be sitting in your in-box right now. Requests for help moving large sums of money out of third world countries are believed to be the second-most common type of spam (after sales pitches for male virility drugs). And as you’ve probably already guessed, the offer
is
too good to be true—it’s a classic scam.

OUT OF AFRICA

Cons like these are called “Nigerian scams,” because when they first started circulating in the 1970s, many came from the west African nation of Nigeria. They’re also known as “419 scams,” after the section of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with e-mail crime. Today they can originate from any number of countries. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein,
they’ve even come from people claiming to have connections to the former dictator or his dead sons, Uday and Qusay. But Nigeria is still considered to be the capital of these scams, so the nickname has stuck.

Handguns are used in 51% of all murders committed in the United States
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THE BASIC SCAM

• Collecting $4.4 million for doing almost nothing is a pretty attractive come-on and, for many, too powerful to resist. If you do reply, the scammer will promise the money again—but this time, he’ll also ask you to send a small sum up front, $1,000 or more, to help in transferring the funds out of Nigeria and into your bank account. Maybe they’ll claim they need it to bribe an official, or to pay a fee or tax that’s holding up the millions that will soon be yours. But sending $1,000 or even $5,000 to secure a payoff of $4.4 million seems like a bargain, doesn’t it?

• What happens if you wire the $1,000 to Nigeria? One thing is certain: You won’t get $4.4 million. The scammer will invent new obstacles to explain why the money is being held up and will ask you for more money to clear up the red tape. No matter how many times you send more money, some new problem will always arise, requiring still more money to help sort it out.

ADVANCED SCAMS

Bank Account Clean Out:
Why settle for stealing your money in installments? The e-mailer may ask you for your bank account number(s), as well as your business cards and blank sheets of letterhead. If you send them the numbers and the materials, they’ll use them to empty all your bank accounts in one fell swoop.

The Travel Plan:
Some scammers even invite victims to travel to Nigeria, where they pose as bank or government officials, meeting in borrowed offices in a bank or government building. While there, you’ll be asked for even more money. If you don’t have it, or refuse to hand it over, you can be beaten, held for ransom, or even killed. The U.S. State Department estimates that at least 15 people have been murdered after being lured to Nigeria as part of a 419 scam.

Foreign Lottery:
Have you ever received an e-mail telling you that you’ve won millions in a foreign lottery? Or that you’ve inherited a fortune from a relative you’ve never heard of? Any time you’re promised a fortune but are asked to pay money up front, it’s a version of a 419 scam.

Infamous stagecoach robber “Black Bart” was actually Charles Bolton, a shy, quiet bank clerk
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eBay Car Purchase:
There’s even a version of the scam that targets people selling cars on eBay. The scammer will buy your car and ask you to ship it to Nigeria, but will explain that a friend in the United States who owes them money will pay for it. If the car sells for $5,000, the friend will send you a cashier’s check for $10,000—the amount they supposedly owe to the buyer—and arrange for you to wire the difference to the buyer. By the time the issuing bank notifies you that the cashier’s check is a fake, you’ve already sent your $5,000 (and perhaps even your car) to Nigeria.

HISTORY

The Nigerian scam started in the 1970s. In those days, scammers sent airmail letters to names and addresses pulled out of old phone books and business directories. Sending letters was expensive, so the scammers usually targeted businesses instead of individuals, since businesses were likely to have more money.

And the volume of mail sent was miniscule by today’s electronic standards: At the peak of the snail mail phase in the early 1980s, it’s estimated that 250,000 Nigerian scam letters were sent to the United States every year. When fax machines caught on, the scam became cheaper than ever. But what really revolutionized it was, of course, the Internet. Who needs stamps or long-distance fax charges? Computers made it possible to send thousands or even millions of scam e-mails with a single keystroke. Costs dropped so low that scammers could afford to target individuals instead of businesses, and they set their sights on pulling lots of little scams instead of a few big ones.

A lot of people have gotten rich off the scams, and in addition to buying mansions and luxury cars, many of Nigeria’s newest millionaires invested their ill-gotten gains in Internet cafés—from which even more Nigerian scam e-mails could be sent.

SCAM FACTS

• No one knows for sure just how much money Nigerian scammers fleece from their victims each year because many victims are too embarrassed to come forward. The U.S. Secret Service estimates that Americans lose as much as $100 million a year.

• For years the Nigerian government ignored the problem, but now
they’re taking steps to fight it—taking out ads in major American newspapers, allowing the U.S. Secret Service to open offices in Nigeria, and even warning westerners as they arrive at Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos. But nothing seems to stem the flow of victims.

First murder in the New World: Plymouth colonist John Billington shot John Newcomen (1630)
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BIG FISH

The National Consumers League calculates that the average loss to 419 scams in 2001 was $5,957. Have
you
been conned? Take heart—some of the largest losses have been racked up by people working in law, banking, or finance—people who should have known better. Take these folks, for example:

Graeme Kenneth Rutherford
. Rutherford, a star money manager and former Citibank executive in New Zealand, was taken in by scammers who told him they wanted to pay him $300,000 a year to manage $30 million for a Nigerian oil company...but first he had to help them transfer the money out of Nigeria. Rutherford poured $600,000 of his own money into the scam, borrowed more from his father, then talked wealthy friends and business associates out of $7 million more, telling them he was investing their money in safe European investments with “locked-in profits” of at least 70%. He sank every penny into the scam and lost it all.

In July 2000, Rutherford was convicted on 23 counts of forgery and fraud and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. He blames his poor judgment on painkillers he was taking for his sore back. “My resolve was hardened by my absolute conviction that the Nigerian scheme was genuine,” he says.

Nelson Sakaguchi
. Sakaguchi, a Brazilian, was a director of the Banco Noereste Brazil in the mid-1990s, when scammers claiming to control the Central Bank of Nigeria “awarded” him a million-dollar contract to finance the construction of a new international airport in Nigeria. The airport didn’t exist, of course, but that didn’t stop Sakaguchi from transferring $250 million of the bank’s money to Africa without notifying any of his superiors, making this by far the largest 419 scam to come to light so far.

Why’d he do it? The scammers promised Sakaguchi that they’d give him a $40 million kickback as his share of the deal, which, of course, he never got. Banco Noroeste collapsed in 2001. As of April 2004, Sakaguchi was jailed in Switzerland awaiting trial on embezzlement and bank fraud.

What famous American prison was named for a bird? Alcatraz. It’s Spanish for “pelican.”

Here’s a glimpse into the minds of serial killers. Be warned: These are as disturbing as they are fascinating. (Number of murders in parentheses.)

“The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself.”

—
Ted Bundy (36+)

“There’s been 11 hardback books on me, 31 paperbacks, 2 screenplays, 1 movie, 1 off-Broadway play, 5 songs, and over 5,000 articles. What can I say about it? I have no ego for any of this garbage.”

—
John Wayne Gacy (33)

“I have noticed that the people who try hardest to impose moral code on others are often the least careful to abide by that moral code themselves.”

—
Ted Kaczynski (3)

“Have you ever seen the coyote in the desert? Watching, tuned in, completely aware, he hears every sound, smells every smell, sees everything that moves. He’s in a state of total paranoia, and total paranoia is total awareness.”

—
Charles Manson (9)

“If you shoot someone in the head with a .45 every time, it becomes like your fingerprint, see? But if you strangle one, stab another, and one you cut up, and one you don’t, then the police don’t know what to do. They think you’re four different people. What they really want, what makes their job so much easier, is pattern. What they call a
modus operandi
. That’s Latin.”

—
Henry Lee Lucas (convicted of 3, confessed to 3,000)

“We’ve all got the power in our hands to kill, but most people are afraid to use it. The ones who aren’t afraid control life itself.”

—
Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker (16+)

“They were sinners. I was doing God’s work.”

—
Eddie Seda, New York City’s Zodiac Killer (3)

“If I knew the true, real reasons why all this started, before it ever did, I wouldn’t probably have done any of it.”

—
Jeffrey Dahmer (7)

Estimate: About 90% of the Tiffany & Co. products listed on eBay are counterfeit
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Sometimes crooks get a dose of instant karma—and sometimes that’s just funny
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C
RIME:
In September 2003, two men attempted to break into a bank in Kansas City.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
Cops in a police cruiser saw the two thieves running down a street with crowbars in their hands and chased them into a grassy field. When they lost sight of the fleeing suspects, the officers stopped and got out of the car—and then heard moans. It turned out that one of the robbers was hiding in the tall grass and the cops drove over him. The lucky thief suffered only a scrape on his forehead.

CRIME:
Wanton Beckwith, 27, stole a car in Monrovia, California, in May 2003. After a high-speed chase by police, he exited the car and ran into a house to hide.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
Somebody was home—and that somebody had a samurai sword. He pointed it at the intruder’s face, led him back outside and held him—at swords length—until police arrived.

CRIME:
In September 2003, 18-year-old Michael Watt walked into a health food store in Uttoxeter, England, pulled out a knife, and demanded money.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The sole employee, 48-year-old Lorraine Avery, refused. “I thought, ‘He’s not having our money, I’ve worked hard for it.’” She looked for something to hit the thief with but couldn’t find anything. So she grabbed an industrial-sized bottle of salad dressing, pointed it at him, and told him to get out of the store. Watt wouldn’t go—so she started squirting him with the dressing. “He kept coming at me with the knife,” Avery told reporters, “and I kept squirting him.” It worked! The would-be robber left the store, and police were able to track him down... by following the trail of salad dressing.

CRIME:
In January 2004, an unknown man grabbed a bag out of a car stopped at a stoplight in Sydney, Australia.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The car belonged to Bradley McDonald, a local
snake catcher. In the bag was the snake he had just caught—a four-foot-long, venomous, red-bellied black snake. “It might teach him a lesson,” McDonald said.

North Dakota has about 1,300 inmates, the smallest prison population in the US
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CRIME:
Roy A. Gendron, 45, broke into a home in rural Alabama.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The homeowner’s son, Richard Bussey, caught Gendron loading furniture and other items onto his truck. Bussey had a gun in his car, so he pulled it on Gendron. But he didn’t have a telephone and didn’t know what to do next, so he made the burglar mow the lawn—with a push mower—while he thought about it. He eventually took Gendron’s driver’s license, which the police used to track down and arrest the thief a short time later. Assistant D.A. Brian McVeigh told reporters that if he ever found himself in a similar situation, “I’ll try to get some yard work out of the guy.”

CRIME:
An inmate at the county jail in St. Charles, Missouri, attempted to escape.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The escapee ran into the prison’s darkened parking garage and headed for an open door marked “Fire Exit.” Sensing that freedom was about to be his, he turned around, gave the approaching deputies a salute, and dashed through the door...running smack into the brick wall behind it. Deputies took the unconscious man to a nearby hospital.