Don't Fall For It

Introduction

The most instructive, indeed the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitude of fortune, is to recall the catastrophe of others.

— Polybius

In 2008, a self-employed handyman named Fred Haines was wandering around Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower airport in search of a Nigerian man carrying two chests full of cold hard cash. After asking around and waiting for an hour or so he finally realized the $64 million inheritance he was promised in an email from Nigeria wasn’t walking off an airplane.

Over a period from 2005 to 2008, Haines mortgaged his home three times in hopes that forking over six figures of cash would be enough to help him receive a seven-figure inheritance from Africa. It’s hard to believe the Nigerian Prince scam could be so effective but some people just want to believe these things could be true. Haines claims the first email he received did come off as some sort of joke or scam. Nevertheless, he was intrigued as the person on the other end of his correspondence promised Haines he was owed tens of millions of dollars of an inheritance that rightfully belonged to him. The scammers told Haines his money was being moved from country to country but they needed money along the way to grease the wheels of international law that were overseeing the movement of his funds.

The scammers said at one point that the money had gone from Nigeria to Egypt to England to New York and once again back to Nigeria. Haines claims to have tried to get ...