The “advance-fee fraud,” commonly known by most internet users as the “Nigerian scam,” is a scam in which the mark is sent correspondence asking him to advance a smaller sum of money in order to get access to a much larger sum. Although there are many variations of the scam, all of them involve sending a smaller amount of money in the hopes of receiving a larger amount.
In the classic version of the scam, an individual receives a letter or e-mail from someone in Nigeria claiming to be some type of Nigerian royalty, military, executive, etc. They say they have a lot of money stashed away somewhere, but the government is after them and they need to secretly move the money out of the country. If the mark provides them with assistance in moving the money, he will be given a percentage of the money. Once the mark signs on to help, the scammer asks for money to be sent to him in Nigeria to be used to cover the costs of moving the money. Of course, the mark never gets that money back and certainly never gets the percentage of the money that was to be moved. The mark is asked to advance more and more money, until the mark realizes the scam and stops sending additional funds.
One of the consequences of the “advance-fee fraud” scam is that, on many occasions, the marks of these scams get victimized again when another scammer shows up to help him recoup his losses from the first scam, or the mark himself turns to criminal activities in order to recover their losses or continue the scam. Such was the case of a Wyoming man named Eugene Sunday, who was convicted in 2010 of bank fraud after trying to pass bad checks and money orders in order to continue an advance-fee fraud.
Starting in 2006, Sunday apparently became ensnared in a Nigerian scam and began sending significant funds to Nigeria as an advance to help the Nigerian scammer move money out of the country. As Sunday’s contacts in Nigeria required more and more money to further the Nigerian scam, Sunday began to commit bank fraud in the United States in order to get the money to send to Nigeria. According to testimony at Sunday’s trial, Sunday applied checks with insufficient funds to a line of credit and subsequently withdrew the funds as cash from the line of credit in order to send the funds to Nigeria. To make matters worse, as Sunday’s funds dried up and he could not send more money to Nigeria, Sunday received counterfeit checks from Nigeria, which he deposited at his banks in the United States in an effort to convert them to cash to send back to Nigeria.
After a trial held in 2010, Sunday was convicted of one count of bank fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 1344 and three counts of uttering counterfeit securities in violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 513(a). Sunday was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison – all because of his participation as a victim in an advance-fee fraud scam. Bank fraud carries a maximum potential sentence of 30 years imprisonment, and uttering a counterfeit security carries a potential sentence of 10 years imprisonment.
In some sense, Sunday was lucky that the worst thing that happened to him was a federal prison sentence. There are many cases of marks of advance-fee fraud scams traveling to Nigeria (or other countries where the fraud originates) in order to track down their money and ending up kidnapped for ransom or murdered. There are also numerous accounts of marks committing suicide because of their inability to cope with the loss.
This article was written by New Jersey criminal defense lawyer Nace Naumoski.
