The Nigerian or 419 scam can take many forms and make use of any of a number of expansive devices. Be it from a phone call telling you you’ve won a prize and that you need to hand over your bank details for a “giving out fee” or an email from someone claiming to be an associate of a king in an African country who requirements a bank account to transfer millions of dollars in to, they all come under this umbrella.
Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook offer fraudsters a new method of misleading someone. Information of how this scam was carried out surfaced in January with the release of a copy of one attempt at the 419 scam. The fraudster hijacks Facebook information like accounts and then makes use of those details to contact the victim’s friends claiming they are in trouble and in need of money immediately.
People are more expected to be taken in by this use of the tried and experienced scam because they think they’re helping a friend rather than some Nigerian businessman. Because although the huge majority of us have learned quickly the dangers of the Web, when it’s a friend in trouble, the usual checks and balances can go out of the window.
Recently there has been an increase in this type of scam on social networking sites. In August, Facebook published the record of one on its blog. And things are now so bad that the FBI has issued a press release forewarning people how to protect them from being caught out by this particular scam.
The best advice is to be careful about what information you share and who you befriend. Beyond that, it’s a case of asking manually whether what someone is telling you are actually likely to be true. It all comes down to totaling a layer of common sense to everything you do online because if it looks dishonest it probably is.