From Canadian Stamp News:

Canadian investigators claimed their first big victory in the decade-old Nigerian Letter Scam [more detail] last summer after arresting three Toronto-area men charged with bilking foreigners out of millions of dollars.  The three-year joint task force investigation included the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], FBI, and United States Secret Service.

Most of the 300 victims are American, but others live in Great Britain and Germany, investigators said.  Victims forked out as little as $52,000 after falling for promises of riches from an illegal money-laundering deal while one coughed up $5 million (U.S.).

Ironically, if any potential victim had been a stamp collector, one look at the envelopes [presumably placed by hand into mailboxes] should have provided a ludicrously-easy clue to something being wrong with the contents.  Of the handful of RCMP-seized letters franked with so-called Nigerian stamps, most were obvious fakes, likely colour photocopies produced in Canada.  The worst-looking one was a copy of a recent 50-Niara commemorative entitled Rock Bridge that had misregistered overly-light colours and perforations that appeared to have been made with a blunted sewing machine needle.

Note: Apparently there is a new variant specifically targeting Mormons.  The African correspondent is reportedly a Mormon who has been persecuted because of his beliefs.  The president of the BBB in the targeted area of the U.S. warns Americans that this is as much of a fraud as the standard Nigerian scam.  She writes, “It is just as bogus, no matter how many times it mentions God, country and church affiliation.”  Actually, that is a useful sentence to remember in general.

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 22:56:45 +0000
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