The centuries-old scam still fooling thousands every year

Telegraph

03-03-2025

It is hard to imagine a more clichéd scam than a down-on-his-luck Nigerian prince emailing strangers overseas for a trifling sum. But the textbook swindle – known as an 'advance fee' scam – still ensnares thousands of people every year.
In the first half of last year more than 8,000 cases of this kind of fraud were reported in Britain, according to banking trade body UK Finance, which said victims lost almost £16m during that period to the scam.
But few would realise in hindsight they were at the sharp end of an ancient trick that has lost people untold amounts of money throughout history, and that shows no signs of dying out.
Advance fee fraud works by a scammer contacting their victim out of the blue, asking for a small amount of money or personal information, in return for a large payday. Once the fraudster receives their first ill-gotten payment, they spin an increasingly elaborate story designed to keep the cash flowing for as long as possible.
Scammers use a huge variety of cover stories to hide their nefarious intentions. But none has stuck in the public consciousness more than that of the Nigerian prince, who is known to promise victims a share of a vast fortune in reward for victims lending him a few thousands pounds.
While many will assume the scam was born amid the dawn of the internet and email messaging, it is actually a deception that is centuries old.
$4 and a pair of trousers
During the early 20th century, newspapers attracted millions of readers and abounded with advertisements – sold by the inch – for everything from no-nonsense business opportunities to the latest innovations in scientific quackery.
One day a new advertisement appeared in a number of American papers written by one 'Prince Morrison', who claimed to be a member of a noble Nigerian family. He wrote that he was in search of pen-pals generous enough to send him $4 and a pair of trousers they no longer needed.
The prince made assurances he would handsomely reward the readers with treasures including ivory, emeralds and diamonds in exchange for their friendship. According to The Confidence Game, a book by journalist Maria Konnikova that investigates the origins of the scam, the money poured in.
The newspapers were soon inundated with angry complaints from readers saying they had not received the promised riches. Once fraud was suspected, an investigation by United States authorities revealed the true identity of the prince to be a 14-year-old American boy.
His status as a minor prevented further legal action and his name remains a mystery to this day. But the so-called 'Nigerian prince scam' had been born – and is still being replicated more than a century later.
This was the 'first reference I could find to an actual Nigerian prince', says Konnikova, adding that the scam was 'huge' and that hundreds of people are thought to have fallen for it at the time.
'This is one of the single oldest scams in history,' she adds. A precursor scam stole money from victims by purporting to raise money on behalf of a wealthy person wrongly imprisoned in Spain who would more than repay them on release. 'That's essentially also the way the Nigerian prince scam operates,' Konnikova says.
'Especially with the Nigerian prince scam, the human tendency is to want something for nothing or for very little. In the original scam that kid pulled at the heartstrings and [that got] people emotional and making impulsive decisions.'
An early explanation of the scam involving a fake prisoner in Spain appears in the 1834 memoir of Eugène François Vidocq, the French criminal turned forensic investigator, who was an inspiration behind works by Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Edgar Allen Poe.
Versions of the trick can be found referenced as far back as the early 1700s in Britain. They were not initially ruled to be criminal acts, until laws against fraud were eventually passed around the turn of the 19th century.
'People are still falling for this'
Mike Britton, of tech firm Abnormal Security, says he has seen many recent cases of people falling victim to Nigerian prince-style scams. 'Attackers continue to reuse these [scams] because they are extremely effective. There are still people today who fall for this type of attack.
'Surprisingly, a lot of people claim to have lost money from the Nigerian prince scam even as recently as a year or two ago.'
Scammers are now much better equipped to target their victims, says Britton, as opposed to sending out thousands of emails and hoping to catch an unsuspecting person. 'They may have sent the email out to 10 million people and if they get 10 of them to respond and cough up money it was a worthy investment of their time. Now the attacker doesn't need to send out 10 million emails, they can pick and choose their targets a little bit better and automate that.'
Advances in technology have also changed the scam. 'In the early days it was extremely poorly written,' says Britton. 'It was poorly designed and that was the nature of email attacks in general because [scammers] didn't have tools like ChatGPT or other things like that. So if you did get one, you'd likely realise it couldn't be true.' But now scammers 'can leverage artificial intelligence to craft the profile of who [they are] looking at and trying to attack. The old method was really to 'pray and spray''.
Artificial intelligence has been used to target consumers in Britain by recreating the voice of trusted figures in 'deep fakes' to promote phoney investment opportunities. In 2023, personal finance expert Martin Lewis branded a video that circulated online and which featured his voice supporting a scam as 'frightening'.
Faudsters have also been known to clone the voices of close friends and family of victims in telephone calls, often purporting to be in distress and needing money urgently.
'Yahoo Boys'
Despite evidence suggesting the infamous scam originated in the US, Britton says many email scams can be traced back to Nigeria, which is a 'hotbed' of activity.
The country has a large, tech-savvy and youthful English-speaking population as well as better internet connectivity than neighbouring African nations. The US's Internet Crime Complaint Centre, housed within the FBI, reported almost $2.5bn (£2bn) in losses tied to Nigerian-originating cybercrime in 2020.
'There are a lot of reasons for this,' says Britton. 'Part of it is a lot of socio-economic factors [such as] high unemployment, low oversight and care by the government and police. To them it's like, 'I am not going to crack down on it because they're victimising somebody in the US or somewhere else. They're putting food on the table and not doing petty crime impacting our own citizens.''
In December nearly 800 people were arrested by Nigerian law enforcement following a raid on a building believed to be a hub for fraudsters who lured victims into cryptocurrency scams with offers of romance. The suspects were not all Nigerian, with 148 Chinese and 40 Filipino nationals among the 792 arrests.
Scammers originating from West Africa are increasingly using 'sextortion' tactics on victims, according to US law enforcement agencies. This form of blackmail involves scammers using intimate images of victims to pressure them into handing over money.