Woman out $400K to 'Nigerian scam' con artists SWEET HOME, Ore. – Janella Spears doesn’t think she’s a sucker or an easy mark. Besides her work as a registered nurse, Spears – no relation to the well-known pop star – also teaches CPR and is a reverend who has married many couples. She also communicates with lightning-fast sign language with her hearing-impaired husband. So how did this otherwise lucid, intelligent woman end up sending nearly half a million dollars to a bunch of con artists running what has to be one of the best-known Internet scams in the world? Spears fell victim to the "Nigerian scam," which is familiar to almost anyone who has ever had an e-mail account. The e-mail pitch is familiar to most people by now: a long-lost relative or desperate government official in a war-torn country needs to shuffle some funds around, say $10 million or $20 million, and if you could just help them out for a bit, you get to keep 10 (or 20 or 30) percent for your trouble. All you need to do is send X-amount of dollars to pay some fees and all that cash will suddenly land in your checking account, putting you on Easy Street. By the way, please send the funds though an untraceable wire service. By this time, not many people will fall for such an outrageous pitch, and the scam is very well-known. But it persists, and for a reason: every now and then, it works. For Spears, it started, as it almost always does, with an e-mail. It promised $20 million and in this case, the money was supposedly left behind by her grandfather (J.B. Spears), with whom the family had lost contact over the years. "So that's what got me to believe it," she said. Spears didn't know how the sender knew J.B. Spears' name and her relation to him, but her curiosity was piqued. It turned out to be a lot of money up front, but it started with just $100. The scammers ran Spears through the whole program. They said President Bush and FBI Director "Robert Muller" (their spelling) were in on the deal and needed her help. They sent official-looking documents and certificates from the Bank of Nigeria and even from the United Nations. Her payment was "guaranteed." Then the amount she would get jumped up to $26.6 million – if she would just send $8,300. Spears sent the money. More promises and teases of multi-millions followed, with each one dependent on her sending yet more money. Most of the missives were rife with misspellings. When Spears began to doubt the scam, she got letters from the President of Nigeria, FBI Director Mueller, and President Bush. Terrorists could get the money if she did not help, Bush’s letter said. Spears continued to send funds. All the letters were fake, of course. She wiped out her husband’s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for. For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted. Spears said she kept sending money because the scammers kept telling her that the next payment would be the last one, that the big money was inbound. Spears said she became obsessed with getting paid. An undercover investigator who worked on the case said greed helped blind Spears to the reality of the situation, which he called the worst example of the scam he’s ever seen. He also said he has seen people become obsessed with the scam before. They are so desperate to recoup their losses with the big payout, they descend into a vicious cycle of sending money in hopes the false promises will turn out to be real. Now, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim. She hopes her story will warn others to listen to reason and avoid going down the dark tunnel of obsession that ended up costing her so much. Spears said it would take her at least three to four years to dig out of the debt she ran up in pursuit of the non-existent pot of Nigerian gold. http://www.katu.com/news/34292654.html
I'm going to go out on a limb, and conclude that this lady isn't the most intelligent person on planet earth. But I could be wrong.
I'm really glad she was brave enough to come forward to let others know. If I were that dumb I'd be hiding in shame. She had plenty of people advise her and she still persisted. Shame on her husband for letting her do all this. She could not have pulled money out of the house and car without him. No wonder these scams still persist. To the Nigerian scammers it's like the lottery. You play enough and sooner or later a loser will make you a winner.
It'll take her only 3 or 4 years to dig out of $400k of debt? So she's either rich already, or this estimate of hers is just another example of her extreme stupidity.
Did anyone else think it was really stupid to have to include this? Um, do people assume every frickin person in the world with that last name is related?
Whoa... I see this all the times in my emails and I delete them...if that lady fell for it, who else will fall for it?? It's NOT going to take me 3-4 years to pay off $400k, for sure!
I assume many readers (this board included) would probably have said something like "this is so dumb, she must be related to Brittany", so the writer nipped it in the bud.
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exactly what I was thinking. If that's the case, I feel bad for anyone with that last name...a fairly common one at that. Was it really necessary to throw that in?
What an idiot. She deserved to lose all that money. But why the hell didn't anybody stop her? You'd think someone else would get worried once she reaches the $100k mark.
"She also communicates with lightning-fast sign language with her hearing-impaired husband." lol that sounds funny.
Maybe she signed on with Amway? Or was most graciously invited to participate in another lucrative -- though top secret -- business venture that will yield her high riches?
Greed combined with stupidity is a very bad thing. I watched "to Catch an Identity Thief" (a spin off of "to Catch a Predator) and I really can't blame the Nigerians. I don't have any sympathy for them either, but I'd probably do the same thing if I were scrounging for food. One of the suckers "cyber" cheated on his wife cuz he thought some hot chick was going to drop everything to come and live with him. I can blame the Nigerians for stuffing my inbox full of junk though. They say 90% of the email traffic are junkmail.