Nigerian Scam Research Articles

Trend and Emerging Types of “419” SCAMS

Technological advancements have revolutionized various aspects of human life, facilitating communication, business operations, healthcare, education, and environmental monitoring. However, this increased reliance on technology has also led to a surge in cybercrime, including cyber scams. The "419 scam" or Nigerian scam has been a persistent problem for decades, encompassing frauds like advance fee scams, fake lotteries, and black money scams. Initially prevalent through postal mail and later via fax, the scam has now transitioned to email. This study aims to identify recent types of 419 scam emails, particularly after the covid 19 pandemic, and explore commonly used email subjects. Analysis of the sample 419 scam emails revealed trending scams like lucky winner, threat of exposure, business/partnership proposals, investment, cancer/long-term illness, fund, and compensation scams. Emerging scams included COVID-related, cryptocurrency, marketing contact, and software development scams. Irrespective of the scam type, scammers commonly employed email subjects such as 'Re', 'Good day', 'Greetings', 'Dear friend', 'Confirm', 'Attention', and 'Hello dear'. The severity of cybercrime, especially the 419 scams, cannot be overstated, as it erodes trust, causes financial losses, and hampers Nigeria's reputation and economic progress. Combatting cyber scams and enhancing cybersecurity measures are crucial to protect individuals and organizations from falling victim to these fraudulent schemes. Keyword: ‘419’ scams, cybercrime, emails, cybersecurity Proceedings Citation Format Falade, P.V. (2023): Trend and Emerging Types of “419” SCAMS. Proceedings of the Cyber Secure Nigeria Conference. Nigerian Army Resource Centre (NARC) Abuja, Nigeria. 11-12th July, 2023. Pp 105-114. https://www.csean.org.ng/. dx.doi.org/10.22624/AIMS/CSEAN-SMART2023P13

THE NIGERIAN SCAM 2.0 How an improved online scam trick made an unsuspecting Dutch man over 20,000 euros poorer


 
 
 
 This paper studies a case of Nigerian scam experienced first-hand by its author. On Tuesday July 10, 2018 I received a friend request on Facebook from someone called Robert Batterman, apparently an elderly London lawyer. I didn’t know the man, but I saw that Batterman was also a friend of two of my trusted Dutch Facebook friends at the time, so it seemed fine and I accepted the friend request. Later, I was sent another message via Messenger from this Batterman in Dutch talking about “something important to discuss with you”.
 A Dutch Facebook friend got a similar message, but this time about “the late Alain Schaap”. We both realized that this must be a Nigerian Scam. I decided to find out some more about this British lawyer and posted a warning about this scam on the Internet the next day. Three weeks later I received an e-mail from a Dutch man who told me he saw the warning a little too late. He had already lost a considerable amount of money and was prepared to tell me what happened.
 
 
 

Phishing email strategies: Understanding cybercriminals' strategies of crafting phishing emails

AbstractIt is a known fact that cybercriminals often manipulate people to steal sensitive information. However, there has been a lack of research in investigating cybercriminals' strategies and the evolution of strategies when crafting phishing emails to entice people to perform a variety of malicious tasks such as clicking on fraudulent links. This study uses a combination of Natural Language Processing (NLP), topic modeling, and clustering techniques to analyze and evaluate the persuasive techniques/strategies, which cybercriminals use when crafting fraudulent emails. Our experimental results revealed the efficacy of using these techniques in understanding cybercriminals' mindset as well as how certain aspects of these techniques maintained consistency despite the evolution of the strategy from early Nigerian scams to more modern phishing emails. The findings of our study indicate that the most common technique/strategy used by cybercriminals is a combination of creating a sense of urgency while promising a reward. Moreover, despite the evolution of technology, cybercriminals are still effectively using the same persuasive techniques. Based on our findings, we provided several recommendations to improve anti‐phishing software and awareness and training programs.

When Hackers Err: The Impacts of False Positives on Information Security Games

False positive rates and their impacts have been a focal point for information security research. However, most of this research investigates false positives exclusively from the system defender’s perspective, while in reality an attacker also faces the classification decision in identifying feasible targets and the consequences of false positive rates. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive analytical model that incorporates the false positives from both the perspective of the attacker and that of the system defender. Our results show that such false positives from the attacker’s perspective have a significant impact on the attacker’s decision making for an attack, as well as the optimal protection strategy for the defender. Our results help to shed new light on a wide range of diverse information security phenomena such as spam emails, the Nigerian scams, and the design of the honeypot as a security mechanism. In addition, we show how an attacker’s misestimation of a certain parameter would affect the defender’s strategy and how the heterogeneity of the systems impacts the defender’s strategy to manipulate the attacker’s possible misestimation.

Internet prevara kao oblik kompjuterskog kriminaliteta

The development of the Internet has contributed to a faster and easier transfer and greater availability of information. Unfortunately, an increasing number of Internet users and services have also resulted in the increase of various cyber crimes. Fraud is one of the most common and prominent property-related crimes committed on the Internet. In this paper, the author presents and discusses the basic criminological and criminal law characteristics of Internet fraud as a form of cyber crime. Focusing on the criminal regulation of the Republic of Serbia, the author discusses the similarities and differences between the traditional criminal offense of fraud and the computer fraud that can be committed on the Internet. In illustration, the author elaborates on the emergence and modus operandi of the fraudulent scheme known as the 'Nigerian Scam' (advance-fee fraud), considering that many Serbian citizens fell victim to this type of fraud. The author underscores the importance of primary prevention aimed at combating Internet fraud and provides advice how to preclude victimization and thus contribute to reducing the prevalence of the cyber crime.

Inside the scam jungle: a closer look at 419 scam email operations

419 scam (also referred to as Nigerian scam) is a popular form of fraud in which the fraudster tricks the victim into paying a certain amount of money under the promise of a future, larger payoff.Using a public dataset, in this paper, we study how these forms of scam campaigns are organized and evolve over time. In particular, we discuss the role of phone numbers as important identifiers to group messages together and depict the way scammers operate their campaigns. In fact, since the victim has to be able to contact the criminal, both email addresses and phone numbers need to be authentic and they are often unchanged and re-used for a long period of time. We also present in detail several examples of 419 scam campaigns, some of which last for several years - representing them in a graphical way and discussing their characteristics.

Impact of a participatory cyber crime prevention programme on secondary school students’ attainment in crime prevention concepts in civic education and social studies

Nigeria is considered by many to be a cyber crime hot spot, and is often ranked among the world's top cyber crime committing countries (e.g. advanced fee fraud is also known as Nigerian scams and 419 scams--419 is a section under the Nigerian Criminal Code Act that prohibits obtaining goods by false pretences). We designed a cyber crime prevention programme based on the action research paradigm. We the used the pretest-postest quasi experimental design to evaluate the impact of the action cyber crime prevention programme on 218 Nigerian secondary school students' attainment in Civic Education and Social Studies. The students were purposefully selected from whole classes in six secondary schools in Nigeria. Our analysis suggested that the action cyber crime prevention programme has a positive effect on students' attainment in cyber crime prevention. Future work includes extending the Action Cyber Crime Prevention Programme to a wider audience in Nigeria and other developing countries.

Multi-Level Parsing Based Approach Against Phishing Attacks With the Help of Knowledge Bases

The increasing use of internet all over the world, be it in households or in corporate firms, has led to an unprecedented rise in cyber-crimes. Amongst these the major chunk consists of Internet attacks which are the most popular and common attacks are carried over the internet. Generally phishing attacks, SSL attacks and some other hacking attacks are kept into this category. Security against these attacks is the major issue of internet security in today’s scenario where internet has very deep penetration. Internet has no doubt made our lives very convenient. It has provided many facilities to us at penny’s cost. For instance it has made communication lightning fast and that too at a very cheap cost. But internet can pose added threats for those users who are not well versed in the ways of internet and unaware of the security risks attached with it. Phishing Attacks, Nigerian Scam, Spam attacks, SSL attacks and other hacking attacks are some of the most common and recent attacks to compromise the privacy of the internet users. Many a times if the user isn’t careful, then these attacks are able to steal the confidential information of user (or unauthorized access). Generally these attacks are carried out with the help of social networking sites, popular mail server sites, online chatting sites etc. Nowadays, Facebook.com, gmail.com, orkut.com and many other social networking sites are facing these security attack problems. This paper discusses a Knowledge Base Compound approach which is based on query operations and parsing techniques to counter these internet attacks using the web browser itself. In this approach we propose to analyze the web URLs before visiting the actual site, so as to provide security against web attacks mentioned above. This approach employs various parsing operations and query processing which use many techniques to detect the phishing attacks as well as other web attacks. The aforementioned approach is completely based on operation through the browser and hence only affects the speed of browsing. This approach also includes Crawling operation to detect the URL details to further enhance the precision of detection of a compromised site. Using the proposed methodology, a new browser can easily detects the phishing attacks, SSL attacks, and other hacking attacks. With the use of this browser approach, we can easily achieve 96.94% security against phishing as well as other web based attacks.

Enhanced Query based Layered Approach Towards Detection and Prevention of Web Attacks

The Internet can be defined as a global system of interconnected networks (wired/wireless) that use a Standard Internet Protocol Suite (Transmission Control Protocol/IP) to serve information worldwide. The client server architecture defines the way in which computing devices all over the world connect to the World Wide Web. In this architecture, the client requests some information from a web server through a web browser. The web server connects to a database server in turn to fetch data. The connection between the web server and the database is the one that needs to be well secured. This is where the role of secure authentication techniques comes into picture. Cyber-crimes are immoral actions that include illegal access of data, illegal interception of data, eavesdropping of unauthorized data over an information technology infrastructure, etc. There are various kinds of cyber-crimes such as Web attacks, Spam, Phishing Attacks, Information Warfare, Nigerian Scams, and DOS Attacks. At some or the other stage, most of these are ramifications of web attacks – an advanced prevention technique of which is explained in this paper. The proposed methodology utilizes a multi-tier mechanism to detect SQL attacks while maintaining the speed and user experience of the web application. The layered approach ensures that a genuine user would never feel that such a security mechanism was in place, while making it extremely difficult for intruders to break in.

Internet Cross Border Crime: A Growing Problem

ABSTRACT The internet offers consumers and businesses a global marketplace. But unscrupulous individuals also recognize the potentials of cyberspace. The same scams and frauds that have been conducted by mail and phone can now be found on the World Wide Web and in email, and these cyber scams are growing. It is sometimes hard to tell the difference between reputable online sellers and criminals who use the internet to rob people. One of the most infamous scams is the “Nigerian letter.” Nigerian scam letters or 419s appear in email boxes all over the world. They offer opportunity, adventure, travel, and an abundance of wealth. If you receive an unsolicited email seeking your assistance, for which you will receive a large sum of money, do not believe it. This is almost certainly a version of the Nigerian or 419 scam. You can protect yourself by learning how to recognize the danger signs of such scams.

A Nigerian scam examined

The appellants, a lawyer practising in Kuwait, a client and a Kuwaiti trading company, had agreed to assist the defendants acting on behalf of a trust in investing in an Arab country about US$65. They agreed to identify suitable investments and to manage those investments on behalf of the trust. In return the appellants were offered 40 percent of the trust capital and 15 percent of the income. However, the capital money was held in Benin and, in order that it could be transferred out of that country to the appellants, various payments had first to be satisfied. This demand was part of a fraudulent scheme by the defendants. The appellants agreed to contribute and between August 2001 and March 2002, they paid, on the instructions of the fraudsters, a total of US$1.375 million. Two of these payments, US$400,000 and US$225,000 were paid into the account of a Nigerian bank,...

The Nigerian Scam Just Keeps on Going and Going and Going and Going

Stop everything! I have found the answer to all your problems — millions of dollars, and it is free money! It is better than the Lotto! Better than gambling in Monte Carlo, or Las Vegas! There is no risk! No catch! You will no longer need to work. You can buy everything you ever wanted. Imagine that! Your kids can attend the best of schools; you can live in a great new house, with only one or two servants, as you don’t want to be too spoiled. No mortgage. No bills. Just think of it. You can jet with the jet set. You can travel the world first class. Oh, what a life!