Nigerian spam scam won’t die

Three years ago I wrote a ‘Net Buzz item about a lunch conversation with a fellow from the State Department who disavowed me of a belief held then that nobody, absolutely nobody, could still be falling for the so-called Nigerian spam scam. He assured me I was wrong – way wrong.

Absent his correction, I’d still be wrong – way wrong – because three years later people are still getting suckered by the same con, witness the tale of an Ohio nurse recounted here in the Akron Beacon Journal. The promise of an easy $6 million has left her $135,000 in debt and, as she puts it in the interview, “screwed.”

“I’m a single mom, and I guess I saw this and it looked completely legitimate,” she told the newspaper, which apparently didn’t ask the woman for her definition of legitimate. “I asked them over and over if they were going to scam me. And now that I think about it, they aren’t gonna come out and say, `Oh, we’re going to scam you.’ ”

And while we can all feel a certain degree of sympathy toward the victim (tempered by the fact that greed plays such a big part in this con) an e-mail from Buzzblog reader Craig Bonvechio raises an excellent point: “How would you like someone that stupid taking care of you in a hospital?”

By the way, Bonvechio was kind enough to bring this story to my attention. We encourage that sort of thing here.