The number “419” refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code (part of Chapter 38: “Obtaining Property by false pretences; Cheating”) . A high proportion of these scams originate in Nigeria.<\/p>\n
The advance-fee fraud is similar to a much older scam known as the Spanish Prisoner scam in which the trickster tells the victim that a rich prisoner promised to share treasure with the victim in exchange for money to bribe prison guards.<\/p>\n
The modern version involves an email from a conman claiming to have access to a fortune but requiring foreign assistance to seize the money. The victim is promised a share but first has to pay out a small sum of money to cover some form of neccessary administration charge.
\nOr sometimes the victim has won a lottery that she hasn’t entered and only has to pay a few dollars to release her winnings, the possibilities are endless.<\/p>\n
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The number “419” refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code (part of Chapter 38: “Obtaining Property by false pretences; Cheating”) . A high proportion of these scams originate in Nigeria. The advance-fee fraud is similar to a much older scam known as the Spanish Prisoner scam in which the trickster tells the victim … Continue reading “What’s a 419?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"iawp_total_views":3,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-115","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrstrellis.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrstrellis.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrstrellis.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrstrellis.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrstrellis.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/mrstrellis.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118,"href":"https:\/\/mrstrellis.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/115\/revisions\/118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrstrellis.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}