The lucrative global business of taking advantage of lonely, gullible, and / or greedy Americans. MSNBC: ‘Nigerian scams’ keep evolving It bears repeating, but do not deal with anyone in or from Nigeria. Also, do not trust anyone you ‘meet’ on the Internet. When I worked at NCSoft, I used to discuss this with my coworkers, my contention being that online ‘relationships’ are inherently less real in some difficult to define way. Working at a video game company I was most certainly in the minority since most of the people I worked with had friends they spent time with only online. But I have seen it happen time after time, online friends betraying one another daily because of the ephemeral nature of online relationships. When I worked as a “Game Master” for Ultima Online I saw many cases where people would get scammed out of valuable items or entire accounts by people they thought of as close ‘friends’. People they ‘knew’ for months or years. This can happen in real life, too, but I would contend that real life presents greater obstacles to ill-doers in terms of detection and consequences. For one thing, in real life, it’s harder to pretend you’re of a different sex or age. Online you can be male, female, young, old, rich, poor, married, or single. Also, if you trick someone IRL (in real life, as we say) you are liable to get your butt kicked.