Australian Scams Nigerian Scammers
It's an old saying that you can't scam a scammer. A 23 year old woman in Australia will tell you that's not necessarily so, because she did it, to some Nigerians no less.
She also got in trouble because of the way she did it.
Nigerian email scams are one of the scourges of the Internet, and everybody hates them. Well, almost everybody. An Australian woman ended up in jail after turning the tables -- to the tune of $30,000 -- on one group of Nigerian con artists.
Sarah Jane Cochrane-Ramsey was employed as an "agent" by the Nigerians, but she didn't know they were scam artists who were setting her up to be their next victim. She thought they were legitimate businessmen.
Her "job" was to provide access to an Australian bank account which she opened in her name where the Nigerians could then transfer money they had received from a phony car sales website. Cochrane-Ramsey was told she could keep eight percent of the transfers.
But, she was a little dishonest herself, and she decided to steal from the thieves. According to the Courier-Mail, she got two payments from the Nigerians, totaling $33,350, but she didn't make the deposits. She kept all the money for herself and went on a shopping spree.
The real victims who believed they were buying cars online reported the scam to police, who traced the account back to Cochrane-Ramsey. She pleaded guilty to aggravated fraud, but the judge is giving her time to pay back the fraud victims before he sentences her next month.
The most amazing thing about the Nigerian 419 scammers is that so many gullible people fall prey to them. A single scammer can send out millions of emails every day, and even he gets only a few responses he can pocket thousands of dollars from them.
Multiply that one scammer by several hundred thousand and you can see why this particular con has grown into an Internet monster no one seems able to stop.
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