98 Years of Mail Fraud
A few years ago I received a letter from a law firm in Madrid informing me that their client Graham Gardner had died in the Air France Flight 447 crash, leaving behind $10 million that was now mine to claim. In the letter, printed on crisp white paper and peppered with seemingly official credentials, Graham Gardner’s supposed attorney recounted his fruitless search for the extended family since the crash, and suggested that he present me as the beneficiary, so together we could share the money.
These 419 scams, as they are known, take their name from the section of the Nigerian criminal code dealing with fraud, and date back as far as 1920. But the contact via mail piqued my interest: Despite how absurd and badly composed the letter was, the accompanying stamps and logos gave it an air of officialdom, of plausibility. It shows how the letter can be subverted, and how a universal tool of communication also opens the door to criminality.
Communication has always facilitated crime, and the letter can be traced back thousands of years, with the world’s oldest known consisting of used to ferry messages the pharaohs of Egypt and the kings of city-states.
