The disappearance of music producer Christian Irwin has been linked in the media to “Nigerian internet scam(s).” The Los Angeles Times reported

Several months ago, Irwin told his friend and former business partner Fortunato Procopio, 47, that he had been unwittingly drawn into a Nigerian Internet fraud and had been threatened by the con artists, Procopio said.

“I told him it was clearly a scam — don’t be silly,” Procopio said Wednesday. But Irwin later received a mysterious $50,000 check, friends and relatives said, and became increasingly concerned.

This struck us as inconsistent with our understanding of these schemes, so we did some research to see if this was plausible.

The “419″ refers to the section of the Nigerian criminal code covering fraud. This type of con is also called “advance fee fraud” because … well, you’ll see.

According to Wikipedia, the frauds began in the 1970’s and were run by the odd combination of Nigerian petroleum companies and criminal gangs. Back then, they targeted high net worth individuals, but email has greatly reduced the cost of “customer” acquisition. The scammers are no longer exclusively Nigerian, either.

Now, a week does not go by without a “419″ scam email finding its way into our junk email filters. They are even popping up in a six month old email account given only to the two hundred members of my business school class, so presumably the fraudsters are buying email addresses from virus or worm writers.

The U.S. Secret Service website says that 419 scams usually comprise these elements:

• victim receives communication from foreign ‘official’
• they make an offer to transfer a lot of money to the victim’s bank account
• the victim is “almost always” encouraged to travel overseas to execute the transaction
• victim eventually pays significant fictitious fees for documents, lawyers, taxes, etc.
• victim, of course, never receives a dollar.

Note that two elements are missing in the Christian Irwin disappearance: as far as we know, he did not travel overseas, and he had allegedly received money, not paid it. But this should be resolved by investigators fairly quickly. If Irwin was a victim of a 419 scheme, there should be a mass of electronic and paper correspondence.

We could find no evidence of a 419 victim being physically hurt or even visited on U.S. soil, but the 1995 murder of an American in Lagos, Nigeria was tied to a 419 scam.

Rumors and dead ends abound in the early going of a case like this, and police confirm that “the internet scam (is) only a theory,” according to the Los Angeles Times. In our view, Irwin’s disappearance seems unlikely to be connected to a true 419 scheme.

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Less seriously, there is a plethora of sites where people bait the 419 scammers. A big one is 419eater.com. Our favorite, which caused us to waste a few hours last year, is Quatloos. See especially this one, which includes this email to the scammers:

Your plan sounds agreeable to me. Hopefully he will get ready quickly because I’m all set to discuss and seal this marvelous business opportunity on the nude beaches of southern France. I have learned in my business dealings it is impossible to be deceitful when you are buck naked. As you may have guessed, I am elderly and a bit shriveled, so I must be assured there will be absolutely no pointing and laughing during our meeting.

Technorati Tags: Christian Irwin, 419, advance fee

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 11:14 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Big Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.