BLACK MONEY SCAM - ALIVE AND SOMETIMES WELL

For years, Nigerian fraudsters followed their 419 scams with a "black money" fraud. Promising to return the money "accidentally" lifted out of a victim's bank account, they showed up with pieces of paper cut into dollar sizes, but overprinted in black ink, claiming that the only way they could have smuggled all this money out of Africa was to overprint it black. The fraudster would then do a sleight of hand trick, take an overprinted bill at "random" and with a special cleaning substance, wipe it. A brand new $100 bill appeared. But, the fraudster would say, in order to clean the entire stack the target would have to buy more cleaning substance. That, the scammer would say, is expensive but, just look at this pile of $100 bills. It's got to be worth it. But as soon as the target would hand over another 10-20-30 grand and the scammer would leave to buy the cleaning substance, that's the last the victim would see of his money or the fraudster. And the pile of black paper would turn out to be just that... worthless black paper.

It's a ruse that has worked for years and, bizarrely, continues to work, despite all of the warnings in print, in blogs like this one, on television and all over the Net. That's what makes the arrest of two scammers last week in Canada all the more satisfying.

The Toronto Sun has reported that a local man looking to sell his business for C$3 million, was contacted by a pair of West African scammers with piles of black money. They claimed they'd smuggled the cash out of Africa, and after working the sleight of hand to produce several clean C$100 bills, asked the man for $120,000 to buy cleaning fluid. The man got suspicious and called the cops, who have now put one man from Zimbabwe and one man from Liberia in handcuffs.

Both have been charged with fraud.

The problem is, most fraudsters get away with their crimes because their victims are foolish enough, gullible enough and/or greedy enough to hand over cash in exchange for a pile of worthless black paper.