Nigerian Online Fraudsters Convicted in Holland

Nigeria has a bad reputation for being involved in countless (really!) scams on the Internet, mostly having something to do with a grieving widow of a general killed in a fight for freedom, and the woman not being able to receive the money he had saved in a bank, several million dollars. I'm sure everybody received one of these emails, and knows what the procedure proposed sounds like: give her your bank account number and some additional personal information, and the money will be wired into it, with promises of at least one million bucks being your share.

A Dutch court sentenced three members of a Nigerian gang for extorting several tens of thousands of euro from victims that were naïve enough to answer the emails promising a stake in the inheritance. The sentences were up to four years for one, for fraud, money-laundering and membership of a criminal organization, according to Reuters. The other two received lighter punishment, of 18 months behind bars, respectively 13 months.

But that's not all, a spokeswoman for the Harlem court said. A police raid in a flat in Amsterdam found fake dollar bills, tens of thousands of euro, documents and financial details of victims from several countries. The report from the Dutch news agency ANP did not specify if the information was about victims that had already been scammed or whether future targets were named in the documents.

Inheritance scams are among the oldest ones in the book, and apparently are still in fashion, as users of Google Calendar have recently reported finding something similar, only this time it was the widow of an ex-embassy worker from Poland, that contacted a serious, lethal virus and passed away in just four days. A warning is not needed, I guess, to keep clear of this kind of email in your inboxes.