True believer syndrome and Nigerian scam

Wanted to write a post about magical thinking and found such wonderful info about it on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking
Will get back to it later.

But it led me to a link on True Believer Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True-believer_syndrome and from there, a link to John W. Worley, renowned psychiatrist, and victim of a 419 scam.

Along with the scam and phish that regularly find their way to my inbox, instead of the email I’m always hoping for from a ‘friend’  (who’s apparently not friendly enough to answer any of my questions or even remember me or my daughter’s birthday) , I regularly find those of the 419 variety.

You know, I can see through 419 scams, thanks to the efforts of people posting on the internet. What I’m not so good at seeing through are ’friends’ who, if they see no furthur use for you, start ignoring you. Guess I’ve been a perfect mark too.

Why should I let it bother me so much? It should just make me appreciate and value my true friends more. Besides, it will come back to her and most probably in this lifetime. You reap what you sow. It’s people like her who, when things start to go wrong, cry out to God ‘WHY ME?’ And you feel like saying, ‘Do you want it in essay or point form?’ 

Here is a pic of someone who reminds me of her. The word ‘narcissist’ comes to mind. 

Anyway, here it is – with some background on how Nigerian scam started, and how very dangerous it could be to fall for it.

The New Yorker – Annals of Crime

THE PERFECT MARK
How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam.
by MITCHELL ZUCKOFF
Issue of 2006-05-15 – Posted 2006-05-08

https://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060515fa_fact – for the complete story.

“According to a statement posted on the Internet by the U.S. State Department, 419 schemes began to proliferate in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when a collapse in oil prices caused severe economic upheaval in Nigeria. The population—literate, English-speaking, and living with widespread government corruption—faced poverty and rising unemployment. These conditions created a culture of scammers, some of them violent.

Marks are often encouraged to travel to Nigeria or to other countries, where they fall victim to kidnapping, extortion, and, in rare cases, murder. In the nineteen-nineties, at least fifteen foreign businessmen, including one American, were killed after being lured to Nigeria by 419 scammers. Until recently,

Nigerian officials tended to blame the marks. “There would be no 419 scam if there are no greedy, credulous and criminally-minded victims ready to reap where they did not sow,” the Nigerian Embassy in Washington said in a 2003 statement. The following year, Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of Nigeria’s Economic & Financial Crimes Commission, noted that not one scammer was behind bars. Last November, however, Ribadu’s commission convicted two crime bosses who had enticed a Brazilian banker to spend two hundred and forty-two million dollars of his employer’s money on a fictitious airport-development deal. (Prosecutions by U.S. authorities are rare; most victims don’t know the real names of their “partners,” and 419 swindlers are adept at covering their tracks.)”