In on the Scam
I am a lucky, lucky fellow. Somewhere, a woman I’ve never heard of is dying of cancer, and she has resolved to give me two million, two hundred fifty thousand dollars because she doesn’t trust her relatives but feels she can trust me or my church to use the money to continue to do the Lord’s work. All I have to do is send her my contact information, along with a bank account number to which she can send the money. Because she is suspicious of her greedy relatives, she urges me to tell no one of our arrangement, but to respond immediately and sincerely. God bless. Although she cannot manage subject-verb agreement, she can perform compound interest calculations and single-handedly work out how to circumvent inheritance law.
But wait! Not only was I offered these millions last Monday, but a second wealthy woman on her deathbed has offered me seven and a half million dollars for pretty much the same reasons. Wow! (Technically, the money is offered to “you/ church,” but, being an atheist, “/ church” isn’t an actual entity, so it all has to go to me.)
Anyone with an IQ above that of gravel would recognize these as scams, of course. The son of the Nigerian finance minister is too well known, so now I’m getting cancer inheritances, windfalls from the Netherlands national lottery, and offers to participate in some shady deal with a Hong Kong millionaire who wants to launder money through my bank account. (My mail server’s spam filter is not working as well as it did a year ago.) Which gets me to thinking.
Authorities shrug their shoulders and admit there is little they can do to chase down ordinary ad spammers, who distribute their rubbish under cover of a layer of false IDs and addresses so thick that sifting through them all to the original source takes longer than it does for spammers to pack up and move, either literally to a new office or even country, or more often metaphorically by deleting spurious accounts and creating entirely new ones. Well, okay. But how hard can it be to chase down bank accounts—which, thanks to the banks’ own security checks, take some time and effort to set up?
The scenario I have in mind is for the Treasury Department or similar entity to set up a few bank accounts specifically to attach these scam offers to. Create an email account and put it somewhere visible on the web, and turn off its spam filter. It wouldn’t have to be particularly prominent, just visible to the public. Within seconds, it would receive dozens of offers of no-strings-attached fortunes, just as soon as it provides a bank account. Some poor agent given the assignment of combing through the spam would send account information for one of the prepared bank accounts to the scam…“artist,” for lack of a better term. And when the scam artist tells the bank where to send the money, the fed just jumps on that account and rounds up the owners. Simple. Even if you don’t catch the creeps, you could make shutting down and restarting the operation, passing a new round of bank handlers each time, more trouble than it’s worth.
So what’s stopping the authorities? The Treasury Department and its relatives in other departments and other countries has some very clever fellows, and employs them to think about stuff like this all the time. Given that the idea has occurred independently to me and Eileene, I’m sure it’s occurred to the T-men. Is it simply a matter of jurisdiction, that the scamspammers all operate out of some tiny kleptocratic dictatorship who actually likes flouting international ethics because it makes him look strong? Or are bank accounts so complex and opaque that the bankers themselves can’t trace who owns them any faster than we can trace email accounts?
Because if that’s the case, we’re all in trouble. Small wonder we keep finding ourselves in Milken-Mattell-Enron-BearStearns-style financial meltdowns. And if it is the case, how could anyone possibly think less regulation of such a broken system be helpful? Unless, of course, they’re profiting off the scam. Campaign donation, anyone?