Anyone with email has received the notes asking for help with thousands or millions of dollars - just cash my check for me etc. It looks like Americans are the softest touches, according to the Washington Post.
"U.S. authorities say Americans -- the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers -- lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. Now financially squeezed, Americans succumb even more easily to offers of riches, experts say.
Though statistics are fuzzy, the FBI-backed Internet Crime Complaint Center says that scam reports by Americans grew 33 percent last year, and that after the United States and Britain, Nigeria housed the most perpetrators. Ultrascan, a Dutch research firm that investigates complaints of 419 fraud, says online scam offers from Nigerians in and outside their homeland have mushroomed this year."
The weakest link in any network security is not the hardware or software, but the people using the network. It looks like that would be especially true in the U.S. Here's the link to the entire article.
Worldwide Slump Makes Nigeria's Online Scammers Work That Much Harder
And here's another take from Tech Republic.
Nigerian 419 scammers: What you didn't know
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