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Regular visitors might have seen my previous entries about some 419 scams that I received in the post. For those who do not know what 419 means – it is a form of advance fee fraud. You might know them from spam e-mails or snail mail that claim you have won a share in some lottery somewhere. The scammers require you to pay a processing fee and if you send that fee off then it’s the last you will see of it.

419 itself refers to an article of Nigerian penal code that deals with fraud. Quite a lot of these originate from postal addresses in Spain or the Netherlands (which reminds me, I got one from Australia a few weeks back that I must write about) but in almost all cases the perpetrators are African and mostly Nigerian.

So how big are these scams and how much money are they netting? Well today according to the BBC, Spanish Authorities have arrested no less than 87 Nigerians suspected of defrauding at least 1,500 people. The police claim that thousands of letters were being sent out by the scammers every day and they estimate that the scammers have netted at least 20,000,000 euro. Yes, you read that right – twenty million euro. But the police also say that it could be a lot more.

According to the article, Spanish police estimate that only 1 in 1000 recipients of a letter need reply to make a profit. They also seized 100′s of computers and mobile phones and 60,000 letters that were to be sent out!

I said it before and it is worth repeating – You cannot possibly win a competition, especially a lottery that you did not enter. And just like the old adage – If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.