No Mugus Currently in Residence

Hardly a day goes by where I don’t get some variant on the Nigerian 419 scam. It amazes me that anyone would fall for these scams. All of them are written in very poor English, none of them correctly addressed to a single recipient, all of them clearly a scam to the skeptical eye.

But this was the subject of a 20/20 episode a few weeks ago. Thousands of people have been taken in by these stupid scams.

Years ago, back before e-mail was the medium of choice, they used to fax these scams to businesses. One of my former employers wanted to follow-up a fax that he received, offering to cut him in on a percentage of the millions if he just lent his bank accounts to the transfer of large sums of money from a country (Nigeria, of course) that was currently sitting on the funds. He probably would have done it if I hadn’t been loudly skeptical on the subject. I’d never heard of 419 scams then, I wish I could still say the same thing.

Clearly, the average American is far too gullible, or the scammers would have found another way to make a living; and the process will continue until Mugu Americans wise up.