The scams are advance-fee fraud schemes, made by scammers aided by spambots that can send large volumes of emails at once.
While Nigeria is often used as a nation in the case, it's usually not limited to the nation. The scam is famous because the scam usually use names of Nigerian high profiles that either pose a significant political figure or with royal attributes.
This type of scam has been recorded to as early as the 19th century. But with the modern internet and spambot software, costs for delivering the scams have lowered significantly, boosting their numbers up high.
According to the FBI Internet Fraud Complaint Center’s Internet Fraud Report (PDF) released in 2001, the scam fraud cases accounted for 15.5 percent of reported grievances. Only one out of ten crimes were being reported on average.
The damage the scam has done exceed $1.5 billion across the globe.
When the Nigerian scam emails started to become common, some people on the internet has began responding to those emails with a counter-tactic to scam the scammer.
One of the earliest efforts for such vigilante act was started by Michael Berry, who launched the site 419eater.com in September 2003 to track the origin and the variations of the scams, as well as to identify and report fake banks and institutions that are suspected to be affiliated with the scammers.
Nigerian scam emails reached its peak in January 2004 to then slowly decreased in numbers.
They're also known as 419 scams. The number refers to the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code dealing with fraud, the charges and penalties for offenders.
