Just two days after my post on the variations on the Nigerian 419 scam, I got the following comment that gave me the good news that the criminal syndicates behind this fraud have been captured and that I am now eligible to get $50,000.00 to compensate me for my trouble..

Here’s the comment that I dispatched to the spam folder:

Attention:

The Federal Government of Nigeria through 
provisions in Section 419 of the Criminal Code
came up with punitive measures to deter and 
punish
offenders.The Advance Fee Fraud section deals
 mainly with cases of advance fee fraud
 (commonly called 419) such as obtaining by 
false pretense 
through different fraudulent schemes e.g.
contract scam, credit card scam, inheritance 
scam, job scam, loan scam, lottery scam, ?
wash wash?± scam
(money washing scam), marriage scam.
 Immigration scam, counterfeiting and religious
 scam. It also investigates cyber crime cases.

This is to officially announce to you that some 
scam Syndicates were apprehended in Lagos,
Nigeria few weeks ago and after several 
interrogations and 
tortures your details were among those 
mentioned by some of the scam Syndicates as 
one of the victims of their operations.

After proper investigations and research at
 Western Union Money Transfer and Money Gram
 office to know if you have truly sent money to 
the scam
 Syndicates through Western Union Money 
Transfer or Money Gram, your name was found 
in Western Union Money Transfer database
 amongst those 
that have sent money through Western Union 
Money Transfer to Nigeria and this proves that
 you have truly been swindled by those
 unscrupulous
persons by sending money to them in the 
course of getting one fund or the other that is 
not real, right now we are working hand in hand
 with Western
 Union and Interpol to track every fraudsters 
down, do not respond to their e-mails, letters 
and phone calls any longer they are scammers 
and you
 should be very careful to avoid being a victim to
 fraudsters any longer because they have
nothing to offer you but to rip-off what you have 
worked 
hard to earn.

In this regard a meeting was held between the 
Board of Directors of FIIB/The Economic and
 Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and as a 
consequence of our investigations it was agreed
 that the sum of Fifty thousand US Dollars (US
$50,000.00) should be transferred to you out of 
the 
funds that Federal Government of Nigeria has 
set aside as a compensation to everyone who
 have by one way or the other sent money to
 fraudsters in 
Nigeria.

***Please note that we will NO LONGER be liable
 for any loss, cost or expense, whatsoever,
suffered or incurred by You in connection with
 the 
fraudsters. Be warned! We have deposited your 
fund at Western Union Money Transfer agent
 location EMS Post office Edo state, Nigeria. We 
have 
submitted your details to them so that your
 fund can be transferred to you. We have also 
paid the Registration and Safe Keeping fees 
and for security 
reasons we have also insured your fund to avoid misappropriation.

Contact the Western Union agent office through
 the email address stated below inform them
 about this notification letter and the transfer of 
your fund;

The letter ended with a name, a phone number, and a website, all of which I have omitted. The phone number had a Nigerian country code while the website had a China top-level domain extension.

I found several amusing things in the message, in addition to the idiosyncratic punctuation. One was the casual statement that the Nigerian government got the truth about the scams using torture. Not for them the euphemisms used by the US government. The second is the curious mixture of formal language and breezy slang (“fraudsters”, “rip-off”). The third is that this comment was submitted in both English and Russian. And finally that after saying that the original frauds were conducted through the Western Union system, restitution would also be done through the same system.

These people just don’t stop trying.