The Nigerian prince and his allies who might have also asked you over an email for your assistance to help save “the first African astronaut lost in space” have finally been arrested by the FBI.
Don’t take it too seriously, as there’s no Nigerian prince or an astronaut seeking your help.
Instead it is a format used by scammers in Nigeria to offer a share in a large sum of money; on the condition you help them transfer money out of their country.
The FBI today announced the arrests of 281 suspects from around the world as part of an internationally coordinated law enforcement operation aimed at disrupting multi-billion-dollar BEC email and wire transfer scams.
With no surprise, the largest number of arrests was made in Nigeria where authorities detained a total of 167 suspects, though a significant number of arrests were also made in nine other countries.
According to the United States Department of Justice, 74 suspects were arrested in the United States, 18 in Turkey, 15 in Ghana and the rest of the arrests were made in France, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom (UK).
Dubbed Operation reWired, the four-month-long global operation resulted in the seizure of nearly $3.7 million and follows a June 2018 email scam enforcement operation known as ‘Wire Wire,’ which lead to the arrest of 74 suspects around the world, seizure of almost $2.4 million, and recovery of nearly $14 million in fraudulent wire transfers.
The arrests primarily targeted scammers who were involved in Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes, also known as “cyber-enabled financial fraud,” where cybercriminals use a spoofed email or compromised account, impersonating the CEO or CFO, to trick someone in the finance department of a targeted company into initiating a money transfer to a fraudulent account.