Anatomy of a Nigerian Shipping Scam

This post will show step-by-step the strategy used by email scam artists (presumably from Nigeria) looking to commit credit card fraud. If you’ve had an email account for longer than a couple of days, chances are pretty high you’ve received a suspicious message from a random person overseas promising you countless riches if only you’d be willing to assist with a bank transfer of some kind. This scam, known as a 419, has been well-documented and has been around for a long-time.

These scams have grown in their complexity over the years and they now target niche markets. Being in the print industry, my inbox has been filled over the years with bogus print orders from these guys. In short, they pretend to be interested in a product you are selling and then engage you in an arduous back and forth regarding pricing. Ultimately they send you stolen credit cards and then ask you to contact a third-party shipping company to facilitate the pick-up. They ask that you cover the shipping expenses – which of course is the end goal of the scam. You process their order with stolen credit cards, they keep your shipping money.

Rather than simply delete the last one I received – I decided to go ahead and engage this scam artist to see how far he would take the process. The following is several screenshots documenting the exchange. Enjoy.

As you can see in the last email, this guy actually sent over four legitimate credit card numbers – complete with expiration date and CVV codes. I decided to end the exchange at this point, but if you have any suggestions – please feel free to leave a comment.