The basic 419 (advance fee fraud) email usually spins one of these tales:
- A soldier in a war area wants to share some money he found
- A government official is trying to get some money out the country
- A bank official has some money to distribute
- You’ve won a lottery
- Some sick person wants to share their wealth
- A charity wants you to help them distribute funds
- Etc.
So while the story’s the same, the names and details will often be changed to protect the guilty. But having compiled our tag cloud (from an exhaustive search of the last few day’s 419s) we note some trends:
- There’s a lot of money coming out of banks in Africa (and mostly North and West Africa)
- Most of it’s from “Mr”, some from “Mrs” and less from “Miss”
- Popular titles: Director, Dr, and of course “citizen”
- Names are varied but people are obviously more likely to trust “John”, “Ali”, and er.. “Dada” (?)
*Tag-cloud generated using Tagxedo