202 african appropriations
hopefully in your country,” and further explains that she received this
huge sum of money “from one of the various payback contract deals I
arranged during my late husband’s regime, this one in particular, from
the Russian firm that handled our country’s multibillion dollar Ajaokuta
steel plant construction.” Such emails are of course intended to entice
their recipients and represent initial attempts at establishing a hook for
confidence tricks, which are also known as 419 (four-one-nine) scams
and are named after the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code. A
recipient who shows interest in such a “business proposal” will sooner or
later be confronted with demands for fictitious fees that need to be paid
before the money can be released. A fter the payment of a first fee (usu-
ally through a money transfer service, such as Western Union or Money
Gram), additional fictitious fees arise repeatedly until the victims finally
realize that advance-fee fraudsters have duped them. Their losses may well
amount to several hundred, often thousands, and sometimes even hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars. “It’s like being a gambler who throws good
money after bad—the deeper you get in the more reluctance you have to
back out” ( James Caldwell, U.S. Secret Service, in Glickman 2005: 468).
Average losses per victim amount to 50,000 U.S. dollars (Peel 2006: 5), but
the biggest single loss ever reported was 242 million U.S. dollars, paid by
a senior official of Brazilian Banco Noroeste, who was led to believe that
his bank would finance the building of the new national airport at Abuja
(Basel Institute on Governance 2007). In 2009 alone, the total losses in-
curred by the victims of such scams were estimated to have reached a new
peak of more than 9 billion U.S. dollars (Ultrascan 2010).
Despite its strong ties with Nigeria and expatriate Nigerians, advance-
fee fraud is not a Nigerian invention. Its origins are, in fact, European. The
so-called Spanish prisoner scam, which is said to have originated in the
sixteenth century, could well be described as a primary script of letter-
initiated advance-fee fraud. This early version of the format involved a
fictitious captive of Philip II of Spain, an English nobleman, who pleaded
for bail in his letters to the English gentry and promised in exchange a
generous reward for his release. The French Revolution and World War I
provided other backdrops for updated versions of this fraud scheme (Edel-
son 2006; Seltzer n.d.).