PREV ARTICLE
NEXT ARTICLE
FULL ISSUE
PREV FULL ISSUE
SHADES OF ALVES REIS: NIGERIAN SCAMMER'S $27 MILLION SWINDLE One of my favorite books is The Man Who Stole Portugal by Murray Bloom. It's the true tale of the most audacious counterfeiting scheme ever. Rather than go to the painstaking effort of reproducing banknotes in fine detail, the gentleman took a very different route. By forging identification papers and other documents, Alves Reis fooled a banknote printer into creating a shipment of genuine notes just for him. I was reminded of this story by a report this week of a similarly audacious scheme by a Nigerian scammer accused of posing as the central bank of Ethiopia and bilking Citibank out of $27 million. -Editor To carry out the elaborate scheme, prosecutors in New York said on Friday, the man, identified as Paul Gabriel Amos, 37, a Nigerian citizen who lived in Singapore, worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in two dozen transactions to accounts that Mr. Amos and the others controlled around the world. The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. Prosecutors said the conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers. To read the complete article, see: 419 scammer impersonates the nation of Ethiopia, takes $27 million from Citibank (www.boingboing.net/2009/02/20/419-scammer-imperson.html) Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
|