Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (73 page)

Cons like these are called “Nigerian scams,” because when they first started circulating in the 1970s, many came from the west African nation of Nigeria. They’re also known as “419 scams,” after the section of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with e-mail crime. Today they can originate from any number of countries. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, they’ve even come from people claiming to have connections to the former dictator or his dead sons, Uday and Qusay. But Nigeria is still considered to be the capital of these scams, so the nickname has stuck.

Don’t bathe! About one person drowns in their bathtub every day in the U.S.

THE BASIC SCAM

•
Collecting $4.4 million for doing almost nothing is a pretty attractive come-on and, for many, too powerful to resist. If you do reply, the scammer will promise the money again—but this time, he’ll also ask you to send a small sum up front, $1,000 or more, to help in transferring the funds out of Nigeria and into your bank account. Maybe they’ll claim they need it to bribe an official, or to pay a fee or tax that’s holding up the millions that will soon be yours. But sending $1,000 or even $5,000 to secure a payoff of $4.4 million seems like a bargain, doesn’t it?

•
What happens if you wire the $1,000 to Nigeria? One thing is certain: You won’t get $4.4 million. The scammer will invent new obstacles to explain why the money is being held up and will ask you for more money to clear up the red tape. No matter how many times you send more money, some new problem will always arise, requiring still more money to help sort it out.

ADVANCED SCAMS

Bank Account Clean Out:
Why settle for stealing your money in installments? The e-mailer may ask you for your bank account number(s), as well as your business cards and blank sheets of letterhead. If you send them the numbers and the materials, they’ll use them to empty all your bank accounts in one fell swoop.

The Travel Plan:
Some scammers even invite victims to travel to Nigeria, where they pose as bank or government officials, meeting in borrowed offices in a bank or government building. While there, you’ll be asked for even more money. If you don’t have it, or refuse to hand it over, you can be beaten, held for ransom, or even killed. The U.S. State Department estimates that at least 15 people have been murdered after being lured to Nigeria as part of a 419 scam.

Foreign Lottery:
Have you ever received an e-mail telling you that you’ve won millions in a foreign lottery? Or that you’ve inherited a fortune from a relative you’ve never heard of? Any time you’re promised a fortune but are asked to pay money up front, it’s a version of a 419 scam.

eBay Car Purchase:
There’s even a version of the scam that targets people selling cars on eBay. The scammer will buy your car and ask you to ship it to Nigeria, but will explain that a friend in the United States who owes them money will pay for it. If the car sells for $5,000, the friend will send you a cashier’s check for $10,000—the amount they supposedly owe to the buyer—and arrange for you to wire the difference to the buyer. By the time the issuing bank notifies you that the cashier’s check is a fake, you’ve already sent your $5,000 (and perhaps even your car) to Nigeria.

Where’s the beach? New York City has 570 miles of shoreline.

HISTORY

The Nigerian scam started in the 1970s. In those days, scammers sent airmail letters to names and addresses pulled out of old phone books and business directories. Sending letters was expensive, so the scammers usually targeted businesses instead of individuals, since businesses were likely to have more money.

And the volume of mail sent was miniscule by today’s electronic standards: At the peak of the snail mail phase in the early 1980s, it’s estimated that 250,000 Nigerian scam letters were sent to the United States every year. When fax machines caught on, the scam became cheaper than ever. But what really revolutionized it was, of course, the Internet. Who needs stamps or long-distance fax charges? Computers made it possible to send thousands or even millions of scam e-mails with a single keystroke. Costs dropped so low that scammers could afford to target individuals instead of businesses, and they set their sights on pulling lots of little scams instead of a few big ones.

A lot of people have gotten rich off the scams, and in addition to buying mansions and luxury cars, many of Nigeria’s newest millionaires invested their ill-gotten gains in Internet cafés—from which even more Nigerian scam e-mails could be sent.

SCAM FACTS

•
No one knows for sure just how much money Nigerian scammers fleece from their victims each year because many victims are too embarrassed to come forward. The U.S. Secret Service estimates that Americans lose as much as $100 million a year.

•
For years the Nigerian government ignored the problem, but now they’re taking steps to fight it—taking out ads in major American newspapers, allowing the U.S. Secret Service to open offices in Nigeria, and even warning westerners as they arrive at Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos. But nothing seems to stem the flow of victims.

Makes sense: Peanuts are members of the pea family.

BIG FISH

The National Consumers League calculates that the average loss to 419 scams in 2001 was $5,957. Have
you
been conned? Take heart—some of the largest losses have been racked up by people working in law, banking, or finance—people who should have known better. Take these folks, for example:

Graeme Kenneth Rutherford.
Rutherford, a star money manager and former Citibank executive in New Zealand, was taken in by scammers who told him they wanted to pay him $300,000 a year to manage $30 million for a Nigerian oil company...but first he had to help them transfer the money out of Nigeria. Rutherford poured $600,000 of his own money into the scam, borrowed more from his father, then talked wealthy friends and business associates out of $7 million more, telling them he was investing their money in safe European investments with “locked-in profits” of at least 70%. He sank every penny into the scam and lost it all.

In July 2000, Rutherford was convicted on 23 counts of forgery and fraud and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. He blames his poor judgment on painkillers he was taking for his sore back. “My resolve was hardened by my absolute conviction that the Nigerian scheme was genuine,” he says.

Nelson Sakaguchi.
Sakaguchi, a Brazilian, was a director of the Banco Noereste Brazil in the mid-1990s, when scammers claiming to control the Central Bank of Nigeria “awarded” him a million-dollar contract to finance the construction of a new international airport in Nigeria. The airport didn’t exist, of course, but that didn’t stop Sakaguchi from transferring $250 million of the bank’s money to Africa without notifying any of his superiors, making this by far the largest 419 scam to come to light so far.

Why’d he do it? The scammers promised Sakaguchi that they’d give him a $40 million kickback as his share of the deal, which, of course, he never got. Banco Noroeste collapsed in 2001. As of April 2004, Sakaguchi was jailed in Switzerland awaiting trial on embezzlement and bank fraud.

The average American six-year-old watches two hours of TV a day.

Warts are caused by a virus called
human papillomavirus (HPV).
You can only catch it from someone who has warts or carries the virus. The virus attacks skin cells, causing them to reproduce at a faster rate than normal tissue, which results in an overgrowth—the nuisances we know as warts. If you’re out of Compound W, here are some folk remedies to hold you over until you can get to the drug store:

Rub the wart with a rooster comb. Bury the comb in your backyard and wait two weeks for the wart to disappear.

Sit in a cemetery for three consecutive nights. Place flowers on a fresh grave while wishing for your wart to disappear. Two weeks later, your wish should come true.

Rub the wart with a piece of wild turnip (or fresh potato peel) once a day for 15 days.

Boil a bone (any kind) and let dry. Rub the bone vigorously over the wart, throw it over your shoulder.

Cut a pinto bean in half. Rub both halves on the wart and plant the bean during a full moon.

Poke the wart so it bleeds. Drip one drop of the blood onto seven grains of corn. Feed the corn to an old black hen. Wait 10 days for the wart to vanish.

Dig up the roots of a pokeweed plant. Fry them in lard and apply the grease to the wart.

Drip a drop of milk-weed juice on the wart twice a day until it disappears.

Rub the wart several times a day with your mother’s gold wedding band.

Tie a human hair around the wart. Hammer a nail into a green tree and immediately remove the nail. Put the hair in the nail hole. Drive the same nail back into the hole. When the hair rots, the wart should be gone.

Mix equal amounts of brown soap and spit. Apply the paste to the wart. Wait 24 hours, then wash the paste off—the wart should come off with it.

Chew on some tobacco leaves. Spit out the leaves and squeeze the juice onto the wart. Repeat until the wart is gone.

An adult human head weighs about 12 pounds—as much as an average bowling ball.

Hey you in the drainpipes with the Tony Curtis! How many of these expressions from the 1950s have you heard before?

Drainpipes:
Tight pants with straight legs.

Silver Jeff:
A nickel (it has Thomas Jefferson on it).

Sudsable:
Washable with soap and water, as opposed to requiring dry-cleaning.

Wock:
A bowl-shaped Chinese frying pan. By the 1970s they were known as
woks
.

Tony Curtis:
A haircut that mimics the one worn by the actor: combed back on the sides, forward in front.

Megadeath:
A unit of measure: one million deaths. Used to estimate the destructive power of megaton bombs.

Bottle:
Guts. A person who “loses their bottle” loses their nerve.

Beatnik:
A member of the artistic “beat” generation.

Neatnik:
Someone who’s obsessively neat.

Intoximeter:
What
Breath-alysers
were called before that term was invented in 1960.

Flaptabs:
Ears.

Hi si:
High society.

Smaze:
A combination of smoke and haze; similar to
smog
, a combination of smoke and fog.

Sack dress:
A short dress that doesn’t gather at the waist: it looks like a sack.

Rabbit:
To talk continuously; babble.

Sin bin:
Another name for the penalty box that hockey players have to sit in when they break the rules.

Peepie-creepie:
A portable TV camera used to film in the field (derived from walkie-talkie).

Bucket bag:
A purse that’s shaped like a bucket.

Tatt:
Garbage; junk.

Skijamas:
Pajamas that look like a ski suit.

Coca-Colonization:
Refers to the inroads that American commercial products—such as Coca-Cola—made around the world in the 1950s.

Cube:
A nerd; someone who’s squarer than a square.

Occupational hazard: About 25,000 workers died building the Panama Canal.

You’d be surprised by how many films in Hollywood are started...without ever being finished. Here’s a look at a few that will probably never make it onto the big screen
.

A
VATAR (1999)

Great Idea:
After
Titanic
made $1 billion and won 11 Academy Awards, director James Cameron could make any movie he wanted—and this was the one he wanted to make. Set in the year 2040,
Avatar
follows a paralyzed war veteran named Josh on a mining expedition to the distant planet Pandora, where, through a computerized psychic link, he inhabits the body of a purple-skinned, nine-foot-tall, ammonia-breathing Pandoran.

Kiss of Doom:
Cameron wanted to use a cast of ultra-lifelike computer-created actors. Plus, most of the special effects needed to render Pandora would have had to be invented.
Avatar
’s budget: a staggering $400 million. No studio would fund it, so the movie was scrapped.

DIETER (2001)

Great Idea:
This was an adaptation of the “Sprockets” skit from
Saturday Night Live
, written by and starring Mike Myers. The plot: Dieter, a German talk-show host, travels to America to kidnap David Hasselhoff (playing himself), who is a huge star in Germany. The script was reportedly hilarious, and Myers assembled a dream cast, including Jack Black and Will Ferrell. Universal Studios thought they’d have another
Austin Powers
-size movie franchise.

Kiss of Doom:
Filming began in July 2000, but Myers hated his script, panicked, and asked Universal to delay the film. They refused, so Myers quit. Universal then sued him for breach of contract. It took months to settle the suit, but by that time the cast had lost interest or moved on to other projects. Plus, Myers and Universal execs weren’t eager to work together after fighting in court.
Dieter
died. (But Myers says he still wants to do it someday.)