Nigerian fraud and Microsoft
The Nigerian/419/advance fee fraud is not our favorite topic. Why not? Because it is still there, after decades, virtually unchanged. Boring. But still a multi million dollar fraud and money laundering business. Although a lot of people blame law enforcement for not getting the problem under control, it will take public private partnerships to tackle 419. The ultimate solution (1. people stopping being greedy and stupid and 2. better allocation of wealth in Nigeria) seems to be one step too far at the moment.
Remember the good ol’ days when you received letters in a yellow envelop from exotic African countries (“My name is ***, I am the late son of ***,etc etc)? In this modern age you find these type of messages (or should I say business proposals) in your inbox. Even though the Modus Operandi has been out there for decades, you can still find people who pay thousands (or even millions) of dollars for all sorts of bogus legal fees and certificates in their quest to receive a multi million reward in some elaborate scheme.
Law enforcement agencies increased their internation cooperation and made some great successes. Actually stopping the crime seems to be one step too far. The cooperation with private partners also increased, especially with internet service providers and financial institutions.
So what is new? This week Microsoft signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crime Commission. “In Nigeria, Internet scams, identity theft, financial scams and spam are unfortunately still all too prevalent. All of this, along with rampant software policy, undermines Nigeria’s economic development and ability to attract foreign investment”. “People and businesses across Nigeria suffer at the hands of these pirates. Honest resellers lose out on productivity, software companies lose out on revenue and governments lose out on tax revenue, which could be reinvested in the country”. So it is about illegal software and 419 fraud at the same time.
EFCC under the new arrangement will leverage on the MOU for the Advance Fee coalition to finance the development of intelligent application and software that will track scam emails and explore the possibility of shutting down affected webmail addresses following due legal process.
Explore possibility? Due legal process? A great initiative by Microsoft but this choice of words is not really convincing. Understandably you can not just delete email boxes…or can you? Sending thousands of 419 emails out using your hotmail or live.com account should be a Microsoft policy violation; cancel the account.
Alternatively, if the ‘intelligent filters’ determine that an accountholder receives a suspected 419 email or sends them out, why not immediately have Microsoft (or whatever provider) follow up with an automated email, warning the recipient of the email they just received. Sending out such a warning email should not meet the same resistance from lawyers as cancelling an account will. The effect could even be better since we all know that Nigerian scamsters have plenty of email accounts to choose from. Fraudsters will find the weakest link in the chain. If Microsoft is the strongest, they will just ignore Microsoft. Education and awareness of potential victims is a great way to prevent them to fall for it. Perhaps Microsoft will explore the possibility to warn hotmail and live.com users if they receive a 419 type email. Or even explore the possibility to send thousands of emails following up on the original 419 email if it originated from Microsoft based webmail such as hotmail and live.
Private companies can do a lot to combat 419. How about internet cafes and internet providers stopping people from sending spam, banks to apply their transaction filtering to related payments, governments to increase awareness. And how about all internet service providers to filter for these emails like Microsoft does and either warn recipients or cancel accounts if they are involved in sending them out? In the fight against child pornography the public private partnership seems to be more effective than in the fight against 419. We would not argue that 419 is a more serious problem but with a little more dedication a lot more can be done.
Enough about 419. Last thing: we know that 419 can be funny if you read and hear how the fraudsters play their role and how the victims are stupid enough to endure all these strange emails, phone calls and meetings. Check out some of these links; some of them will make you smile again.
http://www.nigeria419scam.com/
http://fraudwar.blogspot.com/2005/10/419-from-other-side-of-fence.html
