419 Scams - Nigerian Advanced Fee Fraud
W. African Organized Crime Syndicates
Detection, Education, Eradication

Since the dawn of the internet, criminals have explored the use of technology to further their illegal activities. In order to stem the tide of 419 (Nigerian Advanced Fee Fraud Scams), W. African Organized Crime Syndicate operations and other such illegal activities, Law Enforcement agencies, while cooperating internationally, must also progress in their knowledge and use of technologies capable of tracking these individuals and obtaining evidence for extraditions, arrests, prosecutions and convictions while retaining the rights of those individuals.

It should be noted that Nigerian Advanced Fee Fraud and W. African Organized Crime Syndicate operations are not limited to operating from Nigeria. Cells and organizations operate from Canada, US, The Netherlands, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Ukraine, UAE, Philippines, Malaysia, S. Africa, Cote d'Ivory, Benin, Ghana, Australia, S. Korea and along with other countries, even Japan. While the majority of "nuisance" 419 scam emails emanate from Nigeria, these scammers are often less educated and less sophisticated. On the other hand, those in other countries are often more educated, have better language skills, are more sophisticated in the frauds they attempt and avoid any mention of Nigeria due to the country's negative reputation. Therefore, it is important to investigate those in countries that cooperate with law enforcement in other countries.

It is .NExT Web Security's position that such surveillance can and is currently being performed using totally legal methodologies and technologies, without the use of eavesdropping or software installed on the criminal's machine. NWS utilizes Tactical Investigative Programming (TIP) methodology which was developed by NWS in 2006 to replace the USSS's scam reporting address and to create two other classified applications still in use today. TIP provides law enforcement with intel they need immediately and leverages technologies and procedures that corporate America now takes for granted.

While email spam continues to be an issue, its impact has been drastically curtailed by the use of spam filters for email clients. These filters detect both actual spam as well as judging the probability that a particular email is spam and labeling it as such. The 419buster application uses similar algorithms to ascertain the probability of both scam email harvesting as well as actual points of origination of scams.

The technological tools presented here represent some of the functionality of the 419buster application to be used by both Law Enforcement and Anti-scam Specialists to further their investigations.