You never forget your first
Nigerian Prince. From the desk of a
barrister named Art Vandewald, His
Royal Highness himself has sent
you, of all people, a distress e-mail,
urging you to send help in the form
of a nominal bank wire. You’re his
last and only hope, and in return for
that kindness, he’ll reward you
handsomely… when he surely gets
out of his temporary bind.

In the early days of the Internet,
hapless princes all seemed to have
secret fortunes, but the Nigerian
variant was the wealthiest and
most generous of all. Of course, he
was nothing more than the latest
incarnation of a century’s old
scam, one that had circled the
world and back, but he was effective because he preyed on one
of our greatest weaknesses: greed.
But he’s losing his charms.

The technology that once brought
him to life is now thwarting his
distress messages, but more
importantly, we’ve simply grown
tired of him — he always asking for
favors.
So con artists are adapting
the beloved Prince to infiltrate our
most intimate social circles. It’s
Spam 2.0: the Prince is getting a
makeover.
This post is sponsored by the
Enterprise Mobile Hub and
BlackBerry.
Spam Through the Ages
Last spring, digital spam turned
35-years-old. According to
Computerworld, in 1978, Gary
Thuerk, then a marketing manager
at Digital Equipment Corp., sent a
mass e-mail to the 400 members
of ARPAnet, the first major wide-
area computer network. Instead of
sending separate messages, which
was the custom then, he blasted
out one copy — an advertisement
for his computers — to them all.
With one swift click of the mouse,
he was crowned the father of spam.
“Actually, I think of myself as the
father of e-marketing — there’s a
difference,” he said to
Computerworld. “We wanted to
reach as many as people as
possible to let them know about our
new product.”
The backlash was swift. Recipients
complained and an ARPAnet
representative called him up and
“chewed” him out. “The best
complaint came from a guy at the
University of Utah,” Thuerk
continued. “He said when he got in
the office in the morning he couldn’t
use his computer — the spam had
used up all his company’s disk
space.”
But the marketing tactic worked.
With just one e-mail, he drummed
over $13 million worth of DEC
machines sales.
The concept of spam started
before cursors flickered on
computer screens. As the U.S. Civil
War was drawing to a close,
Western Union let customers pay
more to send telegrams to multiple
recipients. And from 1864 until
the Great Depression, couriers
often hand-delivered yellow
envelopes, containing high-brow yet
vague “investment offers,” to
wealthy North Americans,
according to The Economist.
The word “spam” is actually an
acronym for “Supply Processed
American Meat.” As a food staple
among soldiers during World War 2,
the canned luncheon meat gained
mass appeal among the British
lower class due to its cheap cost
and long shelf life. In the ’70s, the
term became a buzzword for low-
quality fodder when comedy troupe
Monty Python created a sketch
about a cafe that served Spam with
every dish.
In 1988, fraudsters, looking for
ways to pry hard-earned cash from
unsuspecting netizens, modeled
spam after chain letters and “get
rich quick” schemes, forever linking
the mystery meat with unsolicited
e-mail. But it didn’t become
mainstream until the ’90s, when a
shadowy figure popped up in inboxes
around the world: the Nigerian
Prince.
Millions of e-mails asked for a few
thousand dollars to help secure the
release of a beloved royal,
promising a ten-fold return. But in
inner circles, it was just an old
scheme with a new face, called the
“advanced-fee scam,” or simply a
419, which comes from the
antifraud section of Nigeria’s
criminal code.
“The advance-fee scam seems
perfectly made for the medium of
the Internet, with its anonymity
and ability to send thousands of e-
mails with a single keystroke,” Finn
Brunton, an assistant professor at
University of Michigan’s School of
Information and author of the book,
“Spam: A Shadow History of the
Internet,” wrote in an article for
the Boston Globe.
The Nigerian Prince used the same
basic premise as the “Spanish
Prisoner” scam from 400 years
back: a Marquis in the French
Revolution, a soldier in the
Spanish-American War or our
Nigerian friend in modern times
asks for a small wire. Then, in
exchange for your kindness, he
promises to give you a piece of his
fortune, in the form of frozen bank
accounts, Cuban gold or gems
buried on a Parisian estate.
The cons work because deep down,
we’re greedy. We also believe that
where there’s turmoil — during a
revolution or war or, in the case of
Nigeria, a country whose
government is up for grabs —
people can make out like bandits.
And maybe, this one time, it can be
us. But once you take the bait, of
course, unexpected delays start
popping up, problems that need you
to send more money to solve. “The
longer you play along, the more you
fall prey to what economists call
the ‘sunk cost fallacy’,” Brunton
wrote. “You’ve already put so much
money in that it seems crazy to
turn back now.”
An elderly couple in Tampa, Fla.
found out the hard way. After
sending what started as a small
sum of money, they were strung
along, wiring more and more before
eventually mortgaging their house
and losing over $350,000.
According to the U.S. Internet
Crime Complaint Center, nearly
28,000 advance-fee scams were
filed with law enforcement in 2011,
making it the third most frequent
type of online crime in the U.S. In
2012, scammers used the Internet
defrauded thousands of victims
out of an estimated $525 million,
an eight percent rise from just a
year ago.
Spam is a numbers game: blanket a
huge number of people and a few
responses make it worth the
effort. With e-mail, it’s easy to hit
a large volume of targets cheaply,
and that’s why spammers, once a
novelty, became a major annoyance.
Legions of countermeasures have
tried to fight the mountain of
princely pleas. First-generation
filters, for example, looked for and
calculated certain word
combinations to flag unsolicited e-
mails. But in the cat-and-mouse
game, spammers evolved, adding
misspellings, famous names and
often tacky graphics to bypass
filters. That’s why you see the
number “0″ instead of the letter
“o,” or “free mortgage quotes” as
“free m0rtgage qu0tes.”
Of course, filters became smarter
too, stemming the rising tide of
spam, and by 2012, unsolicited e-
mails plummeted to 30 billion
messages a day, down from 42
billion a year earlier, according to
Internet security firm Symantec,
but scammers are transitioning to
social media, hoping to lure clicks,
spread viruses and grab personal
information.
And new platforms, it seems,
demand a new gambit.
Spammers love social media
because it offers two things e-
mails cannot: trust and sharing.
When you get a message from a
friend, you’re more likely to click on
it, and that gives them access to
birthdays, home addresses and
even interests — data they’d never
over e-mail. Vine, Twitter’s six-
second video sharing service, for
example, launched to great fanfare,
boasting over 13 million users in a
little under half a year. Be warned...