My first response

Yesterday, when I finally didnt have anything better to do, so I made up a Yahoo email account strictly for use in my Nigerian email scam detective work (see previous post). I emailed one of the older addresses I had received, thinking that it wouldnt even work. But sure enough, the next day, I got an email from someone posing as a lawyer in Nigeria. And this one was personal, not blatantly computer generated (I know this because he made specific references to questions I had in my initial email).

I was actually pretty suprised. I wasnt exactly sure what to write to him. So, I tried to bait him by telling him how excited I was to cooperate with him and how happy I was to be emailing with such a friendly lawyer. I actually tried to sound pretty gullible. But then I requested some information, like his credentials, CV, some information on the person that supposedly died in the accident whose millions of dollars I stood to inherit. Also just some information on his home country, for my own knowledge of course. I think my goal will be to lead him along and force him to come up with as many false documents as possible. I'll start easy, but hopefully progress to things like photographs and personal references. I figure I'll give him a lot of homework and he'll be too busy to steal other people's money.

What I learned already is that these people (not suprisingly) dont keep very good records. I personally received an email about this deceased fellow, but my fictional email account obviously did not. Any respectable con-artist would realize that their fake email scam was never even sent to the address that was now contacting them about the supposed transaction. But they didnt pick up on this, at least so far.

Anyway, its a little scary to be doing this. I still fear the Nigerian mafia. But I figure there is no way to trace a fake email account back to me. Nothing in any of the account set up has anything to do with me at all. For the same reason, I doubt I will post any word for word content that goes on in the emails (in case they get suspicious and know how to use Google). Really, I just want to understand more about these strange emails I have been getting for the past 4 years. Hopefully the enormity of the world wide web will keep my buried in anonimity.

In closing, I do hope that Nigerians arent into perusing other people's blogs.