The well-established email scam offers the recipient a share of 'over-invoiced funds' - usually several million pounds. The scammers eventually ask for 'advance transfer fees' or persuade the victim to travel overseas to complete the deal.
The scam has been so successful it is now estimated to make $200 million each year from US victims alone. Worse still, one US citizen is known to have been murdered in 1995 while pursuing a 419 scam in Nigeria and several other foreign nationals have been reported missing.
There are thousands of variations of the scam, but recent emails have included links to stories on the BBC news site.
One example, claiming to be from 'Joe Brown working at a UK bank', asks for the recipient to act as the beneficiary for a victim of the Egyptian Airlines crash of 1999. The email links to a story on the BBC site in which the victim is mentioned, and seems to add authority and validity to the scam.
'Mr Brown' says that $5 million is due to be released for the family's next of kin, and promises that the recipient will receive $1 million for helping to release the money.
419eater.com is one of a number of sites that monitors and baits scammers, often wasting their time by pretending to be interested in their proposal. The site founder, who needs to remain anonymous, says that he has seen an increase in the use of BBC links over the past three months.
"It does help to make their story sound more legitimate to prospective victims. To be provided a related news item that has been published by a respected news agency such as the BBC would help set their minds at ease,” he told dotJournalism.
"I would estimate that a 20 to 30 per cent of scam email contains links to a legitimate news story."
The BBC site contains more than two million pages. It would not be possible to post warning messages on news pages that are used in scam emails, said the BBC, because it cannot identify traffic that enters the site by clicking on links in emails.
"The BBC doesn't condone or support its web site being used in this way, but there is very little that can be done about it," said a BBC spokesperson.
"The web is a very public environment, so anyone can link to the BBC. If we could identify the people sending these emails we would ask them to refrain from linking to our site, but it's just not possible."
The scammers have become known as '419ers' after a section of the Nigerian criminal code which deals with fraud.
The 419 Coalition, which works to educate the public about advance fee fraud, estimates that 419 crime is now the third to fifth largest industry in Nigeria, although scam emails can also be traced to Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast.
More news from dotJournalism:
BBC complaints go live
Police probe press ID scam
Chat rooms used to skew share prices
See also:
419 Coalition: http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/
Metropolitan Police fraud advice: http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/419.htm
419 eater: http://www.419eater.com
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3887493.stm
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