Nigerian 419 scammer turns to telemarketing

Senders of the notorious 419 scam email appear to be changing tactics, following up their emails with a telephone call.

The emails typically offer recipients a share of an unclaimed fortune in return for allowing the large sum to be processed through their bank account. Upon surrendering the bank account details the hapless recipient is then cleaned out.

One silicon.com reader alerted us to this new approach from the conmen after she received a number of phone calls and voicemail messages from a Nigerian man, eager to check whether she had received his email.

The reader, wrote and told us: "I had a phone call at the beginning of the week from a man who told me he was from Nigeria, and he asked me if I had received his email, I hadn't and said so. He kept asking me to check my inbox but nothing came in while I was talking to him so I asked for his number and said I'd call him back when it did."

"The next morning there was no email but I had a voicemail message from him asking me to call and saying he urgently needed to discuss the email. I rang the number to tell him I still hadn't received an email but the number didn't work, so I left it at that."

"Then he rang me again. I told him I hadn't received an email and asked him to try to explain what he wanted. He then started to tell me about the dead president's wife and how she needed to get money out of the country! I interrupted him and said I knew this was a scam and hung up."

The move represents a costly shift in tactics for the scammers who may have decided that a phone call makes the proposed transaction sound far more plausible than a bulk email can ever manage.