Forms of email fraud

Email sent from someone pretending to be someone else is known as spoofing. Spoofing may take place in a number of ways. Common to all of them is that the actual sender's name and the origin of the message are concealed or masked from the recipient. Many, if not most, instances of email fraud use at least minimal spoofing, as most frauds are clearly criminal acts. Criminals typically try to avoid easy traceability.

Items may be offered in advance of their actual availability, for instance, the latest video game may be offered prior to it's release, but at a similar price to a normal sale. In this case, the 'greed factor' is the desire to get something that nobody else has, and before everyone else can get it, rather than a reduction in price. Of course, the item is never delivered, as it was not a legitimate offer in the first place.

Such an offer may even be no more than an attempt to obtain the victim's credit card information , with the intent of using the information to fraudulently obtain goods or services, paid for by the hapless victim, who may not know they were scammed until their credit card has been "used up".

The 'request for help' type of email fraud takes this form. An email is sent requesting help in some way, but including a 'hook' such as a large amount of money, a treasure, or some artifact of supposedly great value.

This type of scam has existed at least since the Renaissance , as the ' Spanish Prisoner/Turkish Prisoner scam . This scheme, in its original form,has the con man in correspondence with a wealthy person who has been imprisoned under a false identity, and is relying on the confidence artist to raise money to secure his release. The victim is 'allowed' to supply money, expecting a generous reward when the prisoner returns. The confidence artist claims to have chosen the mark , (victim) for their reputation for honesty.

This confidence trick is similar to the face-to-face con, known as the Stranger With a Kind Face which is the likely origin of the vaudevillian routine known as The Stranger With a Kind Face, a.k.a. "Niagara Falls", a.k.a. "Slowly I turned..."

The modern email version of this scam, known variously as the "Nigerian scam", "Nigerian All-Stars" etc., is an Advance fee fraud -type scam. The following letter is an actual sample of this very common con game. Note the appeal to the greed of the prospective victim, as well as the assurance that the scammer knows the victim to be honest and trustworthy. Note that the victim is offered 30 percent of the proceeds of 24.1 million dollars --yet this is NOT the hook, the hook is the fact that the victim himself will be the one to disburse the money, and a greedy person might see this as an opportunity to keep the entire 24.1 million once it is in the victim's hands.:

See Example of email fraud

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Emal Fraud".