ONE of the joys of using new technology is the insight it gives you into the finance sector of West Africa.

Feb 13 2008 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

There was me, just worrying about my mortgage and the final size of my magnificent pension, until I got on to email. Now, it seems, the old park bencher is the first person every high ranking bank official from Mali to Mombasa thinks of first if he has to quietly get rid of lots of embarrassing millions of Ugandan Shillings, Angolan Kwanza or Swazi Lilangeni.

So off to Teesside goes the missive from the bank’s vice president or whoever. Sometimes the deceased account holder was killed in the 9/11 bombings, sometimes they were bumped off by tribal rivals or they just died in mysterious circumstances. All have one thing in common, they had oodles of cash, no living relatives, and that bank official just wants to share a lot of that cash with little me. All I have to do is give him all my bank account details.

These emails are so risible that I cannot see how anyone can really be taken in. But taken in some are. In 2006 they are estimated to have netted some £150m from the UK with the average loss to the bitten person being some £30,000.

Now there’s a fightback. A small, but robust army of “scambusters” are on the case, and some of their tricks are every bit as ingenious as the original scammers.

One man offered a share of some $277m dollars by “Barrister Issa Muisah”, replied in the name of “Arthur Dent” saying that he needed handwritten proof of identity.

He suggested a number of handwritten pages from a Harry Potter novel, and gave a fax number. Sadly, most faxes seemed to go through badly, and he requested more handwritten pages. After 90 pages the scammer started to grumble. Told that Inspector Morse of Scotland Yard was on the case, the line from Lagos went quiet.

Another scambuster styling himself Derek Trotter Fine Art Dealers, requested the scammer to carve a wooden Wallace and Gromit statue as part exchange for yet more Congolese dollars, while another posed as a film producer who was busy reprising some Monty Python classics. He got the scammers to act out the entire dead parrot sketch courtesy of an e-video link - which was then sent straight to the Nigerian Police for ID purposes.

All good fun. And good revenge for those duped out of their life savings.

- Park Bencher