I don't want to spoil anything.
No jinxies, or whatever, but...
there's a little bit of royalty.
Might have a bit of money, eh for a nominal fee be able to get a cut of a pretty big pie.
Really?!
>> Yeah. You going through with that?
Uh, Guy Fieri says so. Guy Fieri?
... yeah. The, chef?
I was trying to make a joke about eating an actual pie, it doesn't matter.
♫ 'Cause I'm a Modern Rogue! ♫
[synthetic robot voice] 4-1-9 scams
Nigerian email scams.
4-1-9, right? Yes, you know why they call it the 4-1-9?
That's the uh, penal code thing, right? Like the cop code? Like they kick in the doors,
and they've got mustaches and pistols. They're like, "Looks like we've got another 4-1-9
over here." More or less, I like your version, it's way
more exciting. It's the Nigerian penal code for fraud. And
these 4-1-9 scams, they call them that because they originated in Nigeria, but a lot of them
aren't even in Nigeria anymore. That's the whole thing! Right? Everyone thinks
that like, "Oh, I've got a Nigerian spammer or whatever." Like, sometimes I think there's
actually a Prince who's just screwed, because he's in prison in Nigeria. And he's like,
"No, guys! I'm serious!"
Why are they always speaking in broken English?
There's actually a very good reason for this. This is a heuristic that maximizes their input.
Keep in mind, 4-1-9 scam of course is, you have a prince who claims that he's imprisoned
and he's got 300 million dollars and he's got to move to the US. He doesn't know you
from Adam, but he just gots to get moving over and he's just happy to give you, oh I
don't know, a million or two million dollars, right?
Not a sophisticated scam to begin with, which means you don't want smart people responding
to you, because smart people will waste your time, they'll mess around with you, they'll
report you to the police. So the way you eliminate those people, is by writing it in language
just dumb enough that the only people to respond are people who might actually believe that
they're about to become millionaires. And a lot of people, when they read that broken
English, they think, "There's no way that this can be a scam or that they can take advantage
of me, because I'm clearly smarter than they are."
Which is the hallmark of all the best cons, you let the mark feel like they're the one
driving things. Yes, most of these originated in Nigeria in
like the '80s and they were written letters. Of course, with the advent of the Internet,
they became much more popular. Holy cow! I remember the first time I got
an email, and there's that brief glimmer of like, "Oh my god, is this my ticket?!" But
I can't imagine how much more valid it feels when you get a telegram or something, or some
kind of official correspondence that feels like a Telex dispatch from the other side
of the world. Yeah. And of course, what is the one thing
that all cons have in common? That one moment where they say, "And that's
why I need the money, right now." >> Yes!
You create the sense of ownership of something bigger. You promise a big, big prize, and
you act like they already have it. Congratulations, you've won a trip to the Bahamas! Congratulations,
you've inherited a billion dollars or whatever! And only after you let people sit with that
idea for a little bit, do you suddenly take it back, "And all we have to do, little paperwork
you billionaire you. Just, uh if you can just wire over enough money to cover the transfer
fee of all the billions of dollars, that'd make things real easy."
Yeah, and usually it's a long email with lots of documentation, it sounds very official,
and formal, and urgent. >> Right.
And they're only asking for a hundred dollars to get this paperwork moving, and you get
two million dollars. I think it was W. C. Fields that said, "You
can't scam an honest man." And what this all relies on is two feelings: number one, the
feeling that you're about to get a payday; and number two, the feeling that you're a
part of something less than legal. I fell for a proto version of this 20 years ago.
Really? So I'm at a Home Depot, there's some guys
in a van driving around. And then they're like, "Hey man, crazy thing happened. We went
to this boobie club down the way and we installed all these thousand dollar studio monitors.
Well here's a picture in a catalog of the studio monitors, and you can see where it
says they're 1200 dollars each, anyway, turns out we had two extra. You want to buy them
for only 300 dollars?" Keep in mind this was pre-Internet or whatever.
I'm looking and I'm like, "Well, those are the same monitors, that does say the word
1500 dollars or whatever." I'm thinking, o-ho-ho, you guys can't fool me, these are stolen speakers.
Also, let's go to the ATM so I can buy these stolen speakers from you. And of course what
they are is just garbage speakers that they go around telling a story that ropes you in,
and I assume that's pretty much why the 4-1-9 works?
Yeah, there are hundreds of different variations. Some of them, you've won the lottery, some
of them they've bought a bunch of oil at below market prices, some of them are inheritance
and so you just need to pay a small fee to get your inheritance and to unlock it.
So it sounds like no matter what version of the story that it is, there are three key
elements. One, there's a lot of money to be made by you. Two, it's slightly shady, which
is why you should not tell anyone about our conversation. And three, in order to complete
the transaction, the tiniest little bit of monetary transaction has to happen.
Exactly. And that's the most important part, in there, this is just another iteration of
what's called an advanced-fee scam. So they get this fee from you, and then they say,
"Okay, we're going to go ahead and move forward." And then there's another slightly larger complication
where they say, "We need this paperwork, and it's going to cost like a thousand dollars."
So what you're saying is, they keep paying dividends in terms of conversation, as far
as moving things forward, but financially they're bleeding you dry.
Yeah, you have these escalating investments that you need to make, and that's part of
the problem, that they hook you for a little bit and you think, "Well I've already invested
this much, I need to keep going and see it through."
So this is the hidden fourth phase of the 4-1-9 scam, the sunk cost fallacy. This idea
that it's like, "Well, I mean I've sent over $5,000 so far, what do I walk away?
Then I'd really be an idiot. The smart thing is to just handle this next $200 payment and
finally I'll be a billionaire." And then to further entice you, they up the
stakes on both ends. They'll say, "Now, we need $8,000 from you, but guess what? We've
unlocked more funds, it's actually 26 million dollars that we can get to you."
I'm sorry, just real quick, what was the guys name?
>> You in? You in?! Let's do it! >> I was, I was.
But then comes the con within a con, there's a threat to the entire operation.
So, you've got the promise of money, you know it's shady, you invest, you get a little bit
started, they keep stringing you along, you don't want to be a sucker so the way to not
be a sucker is to continue to give them money, and then the moment you want to stop giving
them money-- Then they say the entire operation is in jeopardy,
we need this much money for plane tickets to go meet these associates to convince them.
Or better yet, some "totally other person" calls you, Detective So-And-So investigating
a Nigerian 4-1-9 scam. And they say, "Listen, we need this much money
to bribe this guy so he gets off of our trail." That's amazing.
Now a lot of times they ask for your banking information, that doesn't really give them
anything. They don't use it! But, it lets them know that they have a valid mark.
Wow I never put that together! Because I always wondered that, the bank routing information
is on literally every check you've ever written, because it's 1987.
But I was like, what can they do with that?
That let's them know that you're willing to play ball.
Oh that's brilliant. Uh, okay, tell me some
ghost stories. Terrify me. Okay, I've got some little factoids. How many
emails does a scammer have to send out to get one response?
In the early days, pre-Internet, to market my stage show I would send out 2-4,000 post
cards saying, "Hey, Brian Brushwood is in Atlanta, Georgia. Would you like to book him
at your show?" And I'd get four or five calls, so usually in what they call direct response
marketing, you would expect hopefully a one percent return. I'm going to guess it's worse
and say one tenth of one percent, for every thousand, two thousand you get a response?
They get one response for every 12.5 million emails they send out.
I need to talk to their marketing team, because that's not great. There's a lot I could do
to up their return on investment. But it's emails, it doesn't cost them anything.
They send out billions per year, and these larger organizations make around two million
dollars a year. After the fact, I have to imagine that virtually
nobody wants to admit that they were suckered, that they were scammed, and that they got
taken for a ride. Exactly. The numbers are actually much, much
higher than the government knows, because people are too ashamed to admit that they
were taken advantage of. So, famous magician Penn Jillette had a laptop
stolen, and there were some sexy photos on there. They tried to blackmail him, and he
went to the, he was like, "Well what's the worst that could happen? There's sexy photos
of me out on the Internet--I'll go to the FBI." He called the FBI and said they're trying
to blackmail me for the stuff on the laptop, and he's like, "Well how much money have you
given them?" and he's like, "None, I called you." And he says, "That, that doesn't happen."
Like the FBI goes, "Uh, literally nobody calls us before they've already given up too much
money or whatever." The moment you start, is the moment you're totally screwed.
It ties back to that, I don't want people to know that I'm a sucker, and maybe I'm not
so I'm going to keep investing money to prove that I'm not a sucker.
That's the insidious, brilliant part of this. Is you participate because you don't want
to be the sucker who had the chance to become a millionaire but didn't bother to send a
hundred dollars in. You don't want to be the sucker who has spent $5,000 and gotten nothing
in response, so you send a little bit more. And you most certainly don't want to be the
sucker who goes to jail, because you're being told that you're involved in an investment
scheme that's going to end you up in the Congo. And you don't want to be Janella Spears, a
nurse who lost $400,000. Gave all of her money, took out a lean on her house and her car,
that were already paid for, and then finally realized, "Oh, this is a scam."
So the crazy thing about this is that this scam is actually growing. Even though you
would think that people are-- No way! No way! Everybody knows it!
The most recent number that I found, in 2013 for worldwide losses to 4-1-9 scams, guess.
Worldwide? I don't know, 20-30-40 million dollars?
12.7 billion dollars. Wait, in one year?
Yeah, and it was increasing by hundreds of millions of dollars every year. In spite of
email programs filtering out most of this spam, it's still working, it's still getting
better. Now if you want to have a little fun with
these scammers, go to your spam folder, go to your trash folder, your junk mail filter.
This is a bad idea, it's a bad idea. It's not! It's so much fun, there are entire
websites that communities have sprung up around that all bait these guys to waste their time.
And you're right, that is the only way to punish them so to speak, is to get them to
invest heavily with their time and then give them no reward.
My favorite story was the p-p-p-powerbook scam, where somebody got a Nigerian scammer
on the hook and said, "Hey man, yeah no, I don't have money but I've got this brand new
powerbook. It's from Apple, it's normally $2,500, can I just send that to you instead
of the $500?" And the guy was like, "Well yes!" And then a little thing he said, "Oh by the
way, uhm, you know just as a courtesy to me, would you list it as something besides a laptop?
Otherwise I'll have to pay a big old value-added tax when it comes in." He's like, "I'll make
sure to do that," and sends it, lists it as a full $5,000 dollar powerbook. Sends a box
of rocks over to this guy, and the guy had to pay like a giant duty fee in order to receive
nothing. Brilliant!
Right? I actually was corresponding with a couple
of them in preparation of this episode. Wait, whoa whoa whoa, you mean you personally?
Yes. All right, go on.
I went in to my spam filter and I spoke to the governor of a bank? I didn't know they
had governors. Money's got to come from somewhere.
This is a billion years long, also it calls you, "Hello dear."
I know, I was touched by that intimacy, and he was very friendly.
I apologize for sending you this sensitive information via email instead of certified
mail post mail. Which by the way, this is something that they call anchoring. The mere
fact that he said, "certified mail post mail" and he said that's how he should have gotten
in touch with you lends legitimacy that's not there.
Russel says you're owed 9,850,000 United States dollars, which he made sure to spell out for
you, literally. What did you do? I emailed him, okay, so first I emailed him
back. Now there are techniques to bait these guys that I learned after I screwed it up.
To Russel Nelson, I said, "Mister Nelson, this is quite a surprise. I had no idea that
I had relatives in London. I will of course do all that I can to assist with this matter,
and I'm incredibly excited. Half of that money is mine? What a fantastic bit of news! -Jason"
Russel comes back with essentially what is the first email re-worded. I want this information,
full name, contact address, profession, nationality, etc. Here's where I ruined it.
"Russel, this is all very exciting! I'm very interested in participating. You said that
this money comes from my deceased relatives in London? At first I didn't know who you
were talking about, but now I'm thinking it was my cousin, Dan. We haven't heard from
Dan in a long time, which is fine. After that one Thanksgiving where he drank an entire
bottle of Amarreto, we couldn't be happier that he disappeared. He always talked about
going to London to open a fish and chips business. I thought that was weird, until I found out
that chips are actually french fries! Isn't that crazy?!"
In this guys mind, all he heard was this giant flashing neon sign, saying, "Smart! Smart!
Smart! Smart!" "Anyway, Dan was a drunk, and is probably
the one who died, but if he's got all of this money that he's leaving to me, then I guess
the fish and french fries business really worked out for him. So on to your questions,
I see that you're asking me for my profession. That's a hard one to answer tbh, I'm kind
of a free spirit. I don't appreciate the confines of employment, I just consider myself something
of a rogue. Should I just put 'rogue' there? Thank you, Jason."
I did not think it was possible, but it turns out you're the bigger ---hole in this story.
How dare you! I lost my cousin to alcoholism! He sends you a gift certificate from Amaretto,
is that what it is?
Russel's so insensitive.
-- CC BY BIZARRE MAGIC --