advance fee fraud

advance fee fraud, type of fraud in which businesses or individuals are required to pay a fee before receiving promised stocks, services, money, or products, which ultimately are never given. The targets of the fraud—which include businesses and individuals—receive a solicitation (by letter, fax, or e-mail) from someone posing as a business representative or government official promising that a large sum of money (often in the tens of millions of dollars) will be deposited into the target’s bank account. To ensure this, the recipient of the letter is asked to pay a percentage of the total amount that purportedly will be wired or transferred. Advance fee fraud scams originate in a number of countries and may use internal conflicts or other circumstances specific to that country as a pretense under which funds must be transferred abroad.

The solicitation will ask its prospective victim to respond to the correspondence, including name, address, phone number, and banking information. Subsequent correspondence will ask for a processing fee from the target before the money can be transferred. This fee is often in the tens of thousands of dollars. The letter will often provide specific directions on how this fee should be paid (usually a wire transfer to an overseas bank account). Once the processing fee is deposited, the funds are quickly withdrawn, and the perpetrators either disappear or attempt to coax even more money from the victim. Some schemes have gone so far as to have victims fly to a country, where they are extorted for even more money through intimidation and violence. No funds are ever transferred to the target.

The funds that are purportedly to be deposited in a target’s account are frequently described as money that must be quickly and surreptitiously transferred out of a country due to a number of reasons, such as a civil war, bankruptcy fraud, an unclaimed bank account or inheritance, or the embezzlement of money from a government or business. Regardless of the specific claim, the source of the funds is frequently held out as illegally derived. This tactic is used to increase the credibility of the offer and to deter any victims who accept the offer from going to police, due to their own perceived complicity in an illegal action.

Advance fee fraud has existed in various forms since at least the 18th century, though the modern concept dates to the 1920s. In the 1980s, advance fee fraud became closely associated with African-based criminal groups, Nigerian criminal enterprises in particular. It was sometimes called 419 fraud, after the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code. The 419 fraud scheme was a variation of the confidence swindle, which preys on peoples’ greed and naïveté.