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Countermeasures. Irreversible money transfers. Anonymous communication. Web-based email. Email hijacking/friend scams. Fax transmissions
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Countermeasures
Screenshot of a suspicious site warning in the Firefox browser
In recent years, efforts have been made by governments, internet companies, and individuals to combat scammers involved in advance-fee fraud and 419 scams. In 2004, the Nigerian government formed the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to combat economic and financial crimes, such as advanced fee fraud. In 2009, Nigeria's EFCC announced that they have adopted smart technology developed by Microsoft to track down fraudulent emails. They hoped to have the service, dubbed " Eagle Claw", running at full capacity to warn a quarter of a million potential victims.
Some individuals participate in a practice known as scam baiting, in which they pose as potential targets and engage the scammers in lengthy dialogue so as to waste the scammer's time and decrease the time they have available for real victims. Details on the practice of scam baiting, and ideas, are chronicled on a website, 419eater. com, launched in 2003 by Michael Berry. One particularly notable case of scam baiting involved an American who identified himself to a Nigerian scammer as James T. Kirk. When the scammer — who apparently had never heard of the television series Star Trek — asked for his passport details, " Kirk" sent a copy of a fake passport with a photo of Star Trek's Captain Kirk, hoping the scammer would attempt to use it and get arrested.
Irreversible money transfers
A central element of advance-fee fraud is the transaction from the victim to the scammer must be untraceable and irreversible. Otherwise, the victim, once they become aware of the scam, can successfully retrieve their money and alert officials who can track the accounts used by the scammer.
Wire transfers via Western Union and MoneyGram are ideal for this purpose. International wire transfers cannot be cancelled or reversed, and the person receiving the money cannot be tracked. Other non-cancellable forms of payment include postal money orders and cashier's checks, but wire transfer via Western Union or MoneyGram is more common. Cryptocurrency payments are also used.
Anonymous communication
Since the scammer's operations must be untraceable to avoid identification, and because the scammer is often impersonating someone else, any communication between the scammer and his victim must be done through channels that hide the scammer's true identity. The following options in particular are widely used.
Web-based email
Because many free email services do not require valid identifying information, and also allow communication with many victims in a short span of time, they are the preferred method of communication for scammers. Some services go so far as to mask the sender's source IP address (Gmail being a common choice), making the scammer more difficult to trace to the country of origin. While Gmail does indeed strip headers from emails, it is, in fact, possible to trace an IP address from such an email. Scammers can create as many accounts as they wish, and often have several at a time. In addition, if email providers are alerted to the scammer's activities and suspend the account, it is a trivial matter for the scammer to simply create a new account to resume scamming.
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Email hijacking/friend scams
Some fraudsters hijack existing email accounts and use them for advance-fee fraud purposes. The fraudster impersonates associates, friends, or family members of the legitimate account owner in an attempt to defraud them. A variety of techniques such as phishing, keyloggers, and computer viruses are used to gain login information for the email address.
Fax transmissions
Facsimile machines are commonly used tools of business, whenever a client requires a hard copy of a document. They can also be simulated using web services, and made untraceable by the use of prepaid phones connected to mobile fax machines or by use of a public fax machine such as one owned by a document processing business like FedEx Office/Kinko's. Thus, scammers posing as business entities often use fax transmissions as an anonymous form of communication. This is more expensive, as the prepaid phone and fax equipment cost more than email, but to a skeptical victim, it can be more believable.
SMS messages
Abusing SMS bulk senders such as WASPs, scammers subscribe to these services using fraudulent registration details and paying either via cash or stolen credit card details. They then send out masses of unsolicited SMSes to victims stating they have won a competition, lottery, reward, or an event, and they have to contact somebody to claim their prize. Typically the details of the party to be contacted will be an equally untraceable email address or a virtual telephone number.
These messages may be sent over a weekend when the staff at the service providers are not working, enabling the scammer to be able to abuse the services for a whole weekend. Even when traceable, they give out long and winding procedures for procuring the reward (real or unreal) and that too with the impending huge cost of transportation and tax or duty charges. The origin of such SMS messages is often from fake websites/addresses.
A recent (mid-2011) innovation is the use of a Premium Rate 'call back' number (instead of a website or email) in the SMS. On calling the number, the victim is first reassured that 'they are a winner' and then subjected to a long series of instructions on how to collect their 'winnings'. During the message, there will be frequent instructions to 'ring back in the event of problems'. The call is always 'cut off' just before the victim has the chance to note all the details. Some victims call back multiple times in an effort to collect all the details. The scammer thus makes their money out of the fees charged for the calls.
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