Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/the-jeffrey-epsteins-finan.html
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I feel one thing to remember about any of these scams is that wealthy people got wealthy by not giving away their money for stupid reasons. Unless they just won the lottery, they have enough contacts in the wealth industry that they don’t need the help of some random schmo to move money around.
I get that they appeal to greed and, “what if it’s real?” and that you can’t scam an honest person. Still.
Has anyone done a documentary about the victims of the 419 Fraud scams, and what led them to trust the scammers?
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Scammers use outlandish stories in order to filter out the people least likely to fall for the full scam. In other worse, they use absurdity so that they don’t waste their time on smart people.
Microsoft Research did a white paper about this a few years back:
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An email persona is currently engaged in different scams purportedly from Melania Trump, Steven Mnuchin, and FBI Agent Ted Nugent.
I’m trying to collect the whole set.
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Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell happily living in her Paris apartment a stones throw from the Israeli embassy where her MOSSAD handlers sit and plot their next move…stay tuned!
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I was in the post office about a year ago and a kid in his late teens was desperately trying to get some documents sent somewhere with much urgency. The postal clerk was calmly trying to tell him that he shouldn’t send personal information to anyone he doesn’t know and that it was likely a scam. He was so flustered and certain that he was about to blow a massive opportunity. Don’t know what happened, but the postal employee was doing everything short of refusing to help him send the package.
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I got a 419 scam back in the early 2000’s claiming to be from Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s accountant, so the idea has seen many iterations over the years.
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I’m so old I received a 419 by air mail (mid 90s, IIRC). Someone obviously copied my address from a certain luggage tag with a smudge making an “s” look like a “z”. Possibly a friend of the West African gentleman who introduced himself to me in Victoria Station?
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I used to see these come over the fax machine back in the mid-90’s too. They may have not have even been Nigerian in origin either, grift has no nationality.
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There’s a scam going around that is worse than this.
It goes: Come on out and party! You don’t need no mask!
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The Epstein investigation didn’t kill itself.
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This timeline is so fucked I can’t tell if that’s real or not. 
Only the smart ones, the stupid ones who inherited it piss it away freely.
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