Do you know someone who fell for a Nigerian scam?

I ran into one from OK Cupid. He was in New York but travelled between there and Georgia, where I live. He was doing great and seemed legit for a while. He was head over heels and I got super suspicious once he started sending these long messages that had quotation marks either on the end or the beginning. I googled the messages and they were standard Nigerian scammer mess. I kept playing it for a while for fun and then he suddenly had to go to Africa for work. His laptop got damaged at the airport, he ended up losing his ticket, and then, the final straw was when he went to a charity event, told them that I would donate money, then got upset with me that I wouldn't donate, like I was personally hurting him. Kudos to them for creativity!

This one was a new one on me. I knew the Nigerian scammers were everywhere but I didn't expect them to break into the housing / roofing market. I work in roofing material sales. Recently, one of our contractors was dealing with someone who was out of town and claimed he needed his rental house roofed. This is actually common but the way the guy wanted to do it was another story. The actual e-mail is below. The contractor sent me a copy of the e-mail to ask my opinion and a huge red flag flew up on this one!

"I accept your proposal,i will provide you my credit card to charge for the sum of $5,176 plus the extra credit card company charges and AFTER THE FUNDS CLEAR INTO YOUR ACCOUNT you will deduct the sum of $2,500 as a deposit and send $2,500 via money transfer to the initial owner of the house once the initial owner has the $2500, he will make the keys and authorization letter available to you to start work the extra $176 is for the money transfer service after work is complete you will charge my card for the balance let me know when you are ready for my credit card details"

Needless to say, he did not roof this house!

A friend lost about 5k to one.

It was along the lines of the ones that end up on craigslist where they want to rent your apartment and only have one check, please take first/last months out and send them the rest.... then the check bounces....

Not a Nigerian scam, but a couple of months after my brother passed away last year my dad received a phone call from my nephew (his grandson). The "grandson" told my dad he has been in an accident, was in trouble, and he needed my dad to wire him some money. When my dad asked him why he didn't sound like "grandson" he said he had a cold. Fortunately my dad (who is in his late 60's) called me first before doing anything. I checked around and confirmed it wasn't my nephew who had called him. I think the scammer must have gotten all the information he needed from my brother's obit and was able to search my dad's name & location to get his phone number.

I once got a second friend request from my mother's old high school friend (she was already on my list) without even really thinking about it I accepted) Instantly she was messaging me. Apparently she was stuck in cuba (She actually HAD gone down there for a wedding) and needed money to help her get out... IT was pretty convincing but the only thing is, my Facebook name, as with my MFP name, is NOT my real name. This person kept referring to me as Hazel. Took me all of about five minuted to figure out what had happened. I then went through every person on the fake profile's friends list and messaged them to let them know it was a scam. Took me about two hours to get them all. By the end of it I had about 10 or 15 people message me back incredibly thankful because they were just about to wire money to their friend they thought was stuck. After posting tons of "This isn't the real person, this is a total scam profile" messages on their wall that account was deactivated soon after.

I had someone call me a few weeks ago and said that I got a government grant for $9,000. All I had to do was give them my bank account number.

No but I know someone who fell for an American one. Boo!

I had someone call me a few weeks ago and said that I got a government grant for $9,000. All I had to do was give them my bank account number.

If I gave these people my account number they would be incredibly disappointed.

yes, working in banking we see it way too often. that an the overseas military scam where they find you on a dating site and ask for money in order to "come home". I even know a moron who's fallen for it more than once!!!!!

This actually happened to my husband right after he got back from Iraq. Thankfully, he told the girl no. She said she was stuck in a hospital in Mexico, and they wouldn't let her leave until she paid her bill. And ya know, it's the darndest thing, but he didn't hear from her again after that.

Going through some things of a family friend that passed I found several receipts for Western Union transfers to somewhere in Nigeria along with emails from a 30 something woman claiming to be in love with this 80+ year old man and talking about how she cannot wait until she can afford to come to America and be with him. It was very sad really. He had Alzheimer's and the scammers probably got a couple hundred thousand out of him. Apparently my ex had conversations with him about how it was probably a scam, but he was convinced and couldn't be talked out of it.

Not personally. But my husband is a cop, and made a run to a woman's house because she fell for one and wanted to report it. The real kicker to this....she's a professor at a university.

This content has been removed.

with the lost/stuck/stranded stories the best advice is to get them to go to the embassy for advice, or even offer to call the embassy for them with details of their location. It's very easy to get the contact details of embassies online and if someone is contacting you online asking for money, they can just as easily contact their embassy.

thing is, if you offer practical advice to people who are asking for money, if they're genuine, the practical advice helps. (and this really is the best way to help a friend stuck in a foreign country) If they're a scammer they'll turn down offers of practical help, especially when you start talking about calling embassies about them.

nowhere near on the same scale but when I used to live in London you'd get people who'd ask for money to go towards a train ticket to get to a homeless hostel....... yet if you ever offer to buy them the ticket, they disappear pronto.

LOL YES! My co-worker actually deposited the check in her account!!! Luckily she mentioned it to us at work... but we just couldn't believe she fell for it! It was all taken care of by her bank before anything really bad happened. I guess that's not that exciting of a story...

I almost did... several years ago: I was selling my fridge on Craigslist. A guy emailed me and was interested. We emailed back and forth a few more times, and he eventually said he trusted my description and that he was going to ask his movers to pick it up.

I wasn't clear how or when he was going to pay for it, and I wasn't going to let it go until it was paid for... so I received a DHL package with a corporate check for $10,000 (I can't remember, we had agreed on $200 or something like that). I am an accountant and have seen this type of thing before - someone gets the design and account numbers for corporate checks and starts printing their own checks that look alike and forging signatures. So I contacted the company, and as I suspected, they were already aware of the issue. The FBI was already investigating their case, and I gathered as much information as I could to send to them (emails, info from the DHL package, etc.).

The person who had sent me the check asked that I cash the check and send $9,000 to this other person (who was likely an innocent 3rd party used to launder money before part of it eventually ended up back in a thief's hands) and keep $1,000 for my troubles, but he was sorry that he wasn't going to be able to pick up the refrigerator (big surprise, eh?). Of course, I did not cash the check or send any money to anyone else.

A couple weeks later, I got a call from a Nigerian phone number wanting to know about the money. The guy had a heavy accent and I could only understand half of what he said. Of course, I sent the number off my caller ID to the victim company so they could pass it on to the agent in charge. My guess is that they never got anywhere with that case regardless - it is hard to track these things.

I ended up selling the fridge to someone locally who had rented a garage a couple hours away near a stadium - they were going to use it as a beer fridge for tailgating.

my brother is still giving his "girlfriend" in Nigeria money every month...he is an idiot he has sent over $20,000 already! He says he loves her and she loves him....mind you she is blonde with blue eyes living in Nigeria...dumbass!