I've got to say that cleverness is not part of the scam. It's got to be the opposite: Stupidity.

Many people get scammed by Nigerian scams, but to read that in Queensland State, Australia, there were 3,300 people scammed for a total loss of AUD $4 million, is just incredible news to me.

Now I understand why so many "black people" are contacting me on Facebook (okay just 3 so far, out of 3,400 friends, it isn't that many... is it?) and they each tell me that they will gladly give me a phone call. Once you made a few thousand dollars, it certainly doesn't cost you much to make such a call. From what I heard people there make $1/day and that's probably the cost per minute from these countries (okay, maybe not today, but even at $0.10/minute, you'd need 1 whole day to pay a 10 min. phone call!)

So, watch out! They are everywhere, just keep your banking info private and you can always talk with them, just don't enter their game.

Now, imagine that you can live in those countries with $1/day. You earned $1,000. All of a sudden you can live 1,000 days without having to work. That's 3 years. Say the guy is in his 20's and hope to live 100. That's 80 years, so 80 / 3 = 27, thus with $30k you're set for life. Assuming that there would be no inflation, of course, which is not the case.

Now, AUD $4 million is about US $3.4 million. So 100 people can live for 80 years on that money. That would mean 33 people lured per scammer... so we probably have more scammers. Still, that's quite a large number if you think of it. Imagine getting up in the morning to go on your computer and ask people to send you money. Afterall, it's hard work, you have to create new email accounts, new facebook accounts, new this, new that, then you have to buy lists of emails, actually write the emails (what?! they just copy and paste?!), send them in batches (unless they are rich enough and then they can use a spammer system, but many of those people use Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts.) So I think it makes sense that they get paid for their effort.

Ah! Just in case, if you know anything about those thieves (identifier as Nigerians, but very frankly they could very well be from anywhere,) then you can contact the Australian police!

See more here: Dob in a hacker today