The confidence trick known as "advance fee fraud" is simple, old and familiar to most: an unsolicited message is received from a person claiming to be dying or in prison and this person has A LOT OF MONEY. At times the swindler is a great war general, an heir to a royal throne or a bank official in charge of orphaned funds. The scammers have used a template for the letters from the beginning resulting in each message written in oddly clumsy English, often in all capital letters, with a numeric and written out dollar amount (US$21,320,000.00 TWENTY ONE MILLION, THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THOUSAND U.S DOLLARS) and each begging for extreme secrecy. If you are willing to help them with bank fees and lawyer costs, usually in the amount of a few thousand dollars, you will later receive well over a million dollars.
Of course, the trick is that there is no million dollars, just a group of teenagers in a Nigerian Internet cafe sending thousands of emails a day. The innocent public's response to this scam is wonderful: thrill-seeking, would-be targets easily recognize the poorly written letters and lead the scammers to believe that they're game and ready to send cash. To gain confidence and prove that everything is on the level, the scammers jump through hoops for the intended targets, such as posing in pictures with their pants down holding up a sign that says "BUTT PLUGG" while balancing a fish on their head. Life is grand, indeed.
Derek Erdman painted a picture when he was 12 and another when he was 18. He started making them all of the time when he was 27, now he is 34. He lives in Chicago with a cat and a roommate who is a law student. He likes candy and sleeping.
