Everyone with an email address has met the Nigerian prince who has written to you asking for help in moving billions of his family’s assets outside the country. At a time when online frauds, whether “digital arrests” or fake KYC calls are all around, we thought it worth asking where the OG of cons actually came from — and why it refuses to die. In this absorbing piece, adapted from his book Spam, Finn Brunton argues that the scam we love to mock is far older, and far cleverer, than the cliché lets on.
The message always arrives the same way: a plea from “a wealthy refugee family trying to make it out of Zimbabwe, or the widow of an aide to Saddam Hussein in a hospital in Chiang Rai, or a Russian oligarch’s daughter hiding in the Czech Republic.”Someone is sitting on “US$45,000,000.00” and needs a “compassionate soul” to help move it. This is the advance-fee fraud, or 419 scam, and “it always starts with the same canonical line… ‘Hello! I am a Nigerian prince.'”
Brunton’s real point is that we mistake familiarity for understanding. These, he writes, “are not ads for products… They are part of an enormous web of narratives, running back centuries, about corruption, politics, and the failures of globalization, from which you, the reader, can allegedly profit.”
The lineage runs back to the 19th-century “Spanish Prisoner” trick: a beautiful, rich woman “incarcerated by the cruel King of Spain,” a fortune promised in return for bankrolling her escape — except the bribes, doctors and muleteers keep needing just a little more money. It survives because it bends: “It is a persistent con, changing to suit the times and political circumstances.” The scam works, Brunton writes, “where the spammer’s capacity to generate evidence exceeds our individual capacity to evaluate it — given some wilful suspension of disbelief.”
Drawing on the anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith, Brunton notes the con is “predicated on a general understanding of how a profoundly corrupt society operates.” The writers, working in internet cafés “at 70 cents an hour,” sit at the bottom of the chain. As one told Smith: “The people getting rich from this are the same people at the top who are stealing our money. “
There is a darker mechanism at work too. Citing Jenna Burrell’s fieldwork in Accra, Brunton describes writers obliged to “model the stereotypes of their region that they think a Western audience already believes” — a working version of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” A tale of “wartime orphanhood and AIDS” simply lands better than the truth of someone trying to fund IT classes or rent a flat.
For all the comedy, the costs are real and occasionally catastrophic. When U.S. postal officials cracked down in 1998, “they seized 2.3 million letters arriving at JFK Airport over three months.” Individual losses climb to a “notorious Everest”: between 1995 and 1997 “the entirely respectable international banker Nelson Sakaguchi beggared Brazil’s Banco Noroeste, transferring $242 million.”
Brunton closes at home, in Nigeria, where “419” has swollen to mean fraud of every kind, and where Nollywood has built a whole subgenre around it. The comedian Nkem Owoh even wrote a soundtrack hit, “I Go Chop Your Dollar,” celebrating 419 as “just a game” that everybody plays. It is no endorsement, Brunton is careful to add — “It is simply an illustration of the world as it is… a society of institutionalized corruption in which everyone — from the lowest hustler to the highest official — has been made a part of the game.”
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