There are some very dangerous predators prowling around the web. Take for example advance-fee frauds, also known as the Nigerian scam, or the 419 scam, named after Article 419 of the Nigerian Legal Code. Check it out on the web – just put 419 into Google.

Don’t be too hard on Nigeria. It’s just that they just spotted it first. The fraud also comes from all over the world: Indonesia, Panama, Mali … The vast majority of hardworking Nigerians get very angry at the small number of criminals in their midst.

It starts when you’re asked to help someone smuggle tens of millions of illicit dollars away from an African government, and you’ll be given millions for your trouble! Or you’ve won a Dutch lottery prize worth millions, but there’s an up-front fee, and you must send your bank details. There are huge numbers of variations on this scam.

Before you start thinking no one would fall for this, one sucker from Prague, who had lost everything on a 419 scam, gunned down the Nigerian Ambassador to the Czech Republic.

This scam has given rise to a whole new Internet sport – scam-baiting. The idea is to make contact with the scammers. The game is to scam the scammers into doing all sorts of crazy things on camera. According to the Church of the Painted Breast, it is very rich, but it only gives money to its own members. Scammers are talked into joining the church, where they swear among other things not to listen to rap music, and undergo all sorts of rituals. The Church of Fish and Bread gets converts to pose with a loaf of bread on their head, holding a fish. It’s amazing what people will do when they smell money.

However, I wouldn’t recommend scam baiting to you – we are dealing with some very nasty people here. Don’t go anywhere near them. But be aware, they are stalking you.

Though most corporations claim not to disclose or sell user information to third parties, the reality is quite the opposite.

During the registration process in some recent dealings with a major bank in India, I ended up giving a relative’s cell phone number as my contact number because I was about to travel abroad for a few months. I would normally never give out this number, and I clearly remember only ever giving it away once, on this occasion to the bank.

A few days later my relative received an SMS message on his cell phone, but addressed to me. I was informed that I had won thousands of dollars in prize money, and was asked to register on their website with my bank details to claim the prize.

It set me thinking about how this could happen. Did the bank sell my information on to someone? OR, as is more likely, was my information stolen from their database, and then sold?

I am not sure what happened, but I know one thing for sure: I am a victim.

As Professor Ian Angell so rightly says “Be afraid, be very afraid”.

Once I received an email from a source that claimed to be a globally operating airline company with a job offer for the post of an IT Manager. It was a nice warm personal message, containing details of the job they were offering, the nice fat salary, and a lot of extra perks like a company car and telephone.

 I had in fact previously posted my resume on a popular job portal, and a few weeks earlier someone claiming to be from that same company had interviewed me over the phone. I thought I’d ‘cracked it’, and was delighted to receive a job offer in these difficult times.

 The email seemed completely authentic, but doubts started to creep in when I spotted a spelling mistake in the company brand: a household name. I decided to check out the email in detail before conveying the ‘good news’ to friends and family.

 Of course, on careful inspection I found that it was fake!

 a) The email address was incorrect, and was sent from a domain name that looked almost identical to the actual airline company … but not quite.


b) The company postal address was incorrect.


c) What is more, they had asked me to pay 1500 pounds via wire transfer towards my Work Permit expenses, and also to post my passport to a local company they had nominated. They assured me I would be reimbursed, and that my passport returned within 2 weeks of signing up.

 It was a scam!  They had extracted information about me that was available on the Internet, and then sent me a fake job offer, with the intent of not only extracting money from me, but also stealing my passport.

 All web users should be very wary of  (often unsolicited) job offers that arrive unexpectedly over the web. Next time it could be you receiving the offer of ‘a job that never was’.