Villainous Victims

What do you call someone who engages in dozens of surreptitious transactions to steal tens of millions of dollars? Sometimes they’re called criminals, other times they’re called victims.

Enron executives steered the company’s funds into a series of complicated tax shelters to inflate its profit reports while at the same time evading tax obligations through a dizzying manipulation of the tax code. The scheme collapsed; the top Enron executives were reviled as criminals and subsequently prosecuted. This is how it should it be.

But it’s not just big business executives who conspire to swindle millions of dollars of other people’s money. Thanks to the internet, ordinary Americans can now try their hands at big-time fraud. Propelled by a volatile mixture of cupidity and stupidity, many Americans engage in very shady business dealings, and yet, amazingly, our government treats them like victims.

In one recent scheme, an e-mail or letter arrives, supposedly from a member of the U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. The writer claims to have come across $36 million in Taliban drug money, and he is looking for help sneaking it out of the country (apparently in the spirit of the movie, “Three Kings”). Even more despicable are letters that offer a chance to get hold of cash found in the collapse of the World Trade Center or to collect on phony life-insurance policies for servicemen killed in the Pentagon attack.

Ten thousand of these letters go out everyday, tempting anyone with an inbox to steal what does not belong to them. It doesn’t take more than a rudimentary understanding of morality to realize that this type of theft is wrong, but apparently the Secret Service—the branch of the Treasury Department responsible for investigating counterfeiting and fraud—doesn’t possess even this threshold understanding. Instead of punishing or condemning these gluttons, our government treats them like victims.

The letters taking advantage of the war on terror may be new, but the basic scheme goes back to the early 1980s, when it first started to emerge in Nigeria. Named after this West African country, the “Nigeria scam” presents itself as a way to steal millions of dollars from disorganized, foreign governments. Its myriad permutations all follow a general pattern: an unsolicited e-mail arrives from a stranger claiming to be a government official, usually in Nigeria. He has come across ten to 60 million dollars that are unaccounted for in the government’s books, and he offers 20 percent of it in exchange for helping him remove the money from the country.

There are always some colorful details thrown in about the origins of the money. Sometimes it’s a payoff from an outgoing government, sometimes it’s an over-invoiced government contract. Other times it’s pure graft. The only common thread is that the money does not belong to him, which is the very reason he needs to get it into a foreign account quickly.

So far, so good.

Sure, he’s a stranger. Sure, he’s trying to involve you in an international money-laundering scheme. But he’s got a Yahoo! account so he must be legitimate.

All you have to do is forward him your address, phone number, bank account and other personal details. Later, of course, you’ll have to sign some blank documents and send him a color photocopy of your passport, but no one mentions this up front. Eventually, if you succeed in jumping through all these hoops, the millions of dollars will be yours—once you fly to Nigeria and collect it in person.

As unbelievable as this scam sounds, the truly incredible part is that anyone believes it. In fact, the Secret Service’s website even complains about the “perception that no one is prone to enter into such an obviously suspicious relationship.” In fact, in 2001 alone there were more than 2,600 Americans who went along with this scam, some losing as much as $70,000.

On some basic level these people should be pitied for their gullibility and financial losses, and that’s certainly the tack taken by the Secret Service, which refers to these saps as “victims.” To be sure, there are some victims like the American who was murdered in Lagos, Nigeria in 1995 while pursuing the Nigeria scam. Yet this exception only proves the rule. No one deserves to die for attempting to steal this money, but it seems fair that they lose their money, since they are, after all, attempting to take part in international fraud.

It’s hard to feel too sorry for the vast majority of these crooks (who lose their money, not their lives). These so-called victims are greedy people willing to steal money from the coffers of a foreign government, willing to help corrupt bureaucrats cash out their bribe money, and even willing to take advantage of last year’s terrorist attacks.

It does not matter that they are not the ones who initiated the scam, nor does is it matter that they are often not legally culpable, since the money never appears. None of this diminishes the moral deceit of their actions. Like their Nigerian co-conspirators, the Americans who take part in this scheme should be dismissed as dishonest cheats, not pitied as victims.

Even if the Secret Service insists on calling them victims, these people are nothing more than would-be criminals. Instead of devoting precious investigative resources to these scams, our government should transfer that effort to tracking down Osama bin Laden, finding the anthrax mailer, or at the very least, scouring corporate tax statements.

Let the American and Nigerian crooks rob each other blind. This seems like a fitting way to deal with the Nigeria scam.

Jonathan P. Abel ’05, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.