The Internet is a wonderful thing but for some the opportunities it presents for fraud are too much to resist.

HEY, my luck must be changing. Earlier today I received an intriguing e-mail from a close relative of an African royal family.

Apparently he is in a bit of a fix and he needs my help. It seems that before the people of his country rose up and turfed the royals out on their blue-blooded backsides, his relative managed to stash a huge fortune. Kind of like an unofficial retirement plan.

The only problem is all this cash - several million - is now washing about in some dodgy African bank account somewhere and my new pal needs to transfer it to the west pronto.

He wants to use my bank account as a conduit to the UK and for my part in the money transfer, he will cut me in on a slice of the profits. For nothing more than a few e-mail details I could earn a cool two or three million. What could be easier?

All I have to do is send my bank account details and the rest will be taken care of.

Sound familiar? If you have an e-mail account that's more than a few months old, it should do.

Had I decided to play along with this fairly transparent scam, requests would have followed for further bank details and money on account ("expenses" nudge, nudge, wink, wink, needed to grease the palms of bent officials in whichever country the fraudsters happen to be hiding behind).

If I were lucky I'd lose a few hundred quid and be left feeling stupid at having fallen for such a con.

But some victims have lost far more than that. Many have found their savings pillaged, a few have even lost more than that.

In America recently an accountant admitted to defrauding his employer of $2.1m after being taken for a ride by these conmen. One man who flew to Africa was held up at gunpoint and forced to withdraw every last cent in his bank account.

Cons that demand cash up-front are as old as currency itself but the e-mail brand - known as the 419 Scam after a Nigerian law that forbids it - originated during the 1980s.

Then it was a postal sting. The usual letter would be posted out to thousands of addresses and the fraudsters would wait for the gullible to reply.

Computers changed all that. E-mail allows the scammers to send the same letter to thousands of computers all over the world with a simple mouse click. With the growth of the Internet and the massive popularity of e-mail the 419 Scam exploded.

As Nigeria seems to be the most likely locale for the con artists, both the Nigerian Government and the Central Bank of Nigeria have taken a lead in publicising the dangers of the 419 Scam.

But the problem doesn't go away and every few months there will be a warning in papers like The Northern Echo urging readers not to reply no matter how tempting the offer may seem. As one North-East trading standards officer commented: "If it seems too good to be true - then it almost certainly is."

The problem is the increasing diversity of these scams. At last count there were more than 2,000. Some use preposterous names like Elvis; others prefer to implicate real-life political figures like Nelson Mandela who was recently used in a 419 Scam that originated from South Africa. But what can you do if such a tempting offer arrives in your in- tray?\par The easiest way of dealing with fraud is to trash it; just as you throw away all those postal circulars telling you that you are just one phone call away from a million dollar prize.

Some enterprising web users have attempted to play the fraudsters at their own game - going along with the sting by promising to co-operate but making more and more ludicrous demands until the criminals realise they have been had.

You can read some of the more amusing correspondence on www.quatloos.com/brad_christensen.htm. I particularly enjoyed the showdown in which Christensen agreed to meet his Nigerian friends - but only on a nudist beach and suitably undressed.

The scam has become so well known on the underground that it has even spawned its own range of 419 merchandise. For a small sum you can purchase mugs and t-shirts - a fantastic example of someone using an apparently worthless con to make legitimate money.

If you take the issue more seriously, the UK's National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) has a dedicated web address to which copies can be forwarded. Send your e-mails to 419spring39.demon.co.uk. Alternatively you can contact your local police force which will advise you on how to contact NCIS direct.

So maybe my luck isn't changing after all. Ah well, I guess there's always that chain letter I sent off ten years ago - I'm expecting the millions to come flooding in any day now.

Published: 03/01/2003