The shameless scam continued…
As soon as this information is received, your payment will be made to you in A Certified Bank Draft or wired to your nominated bank account directly from Central Bank of Nigeria.
You can mail me on my direct email address…
Yeah, Alex thought, shaking her head. Don’t even try to phone because a phone call can be traced. She skipped ahead. It was signed,
Regards,
Dr. Samuel Ifraim
Executive Governor,
Central Credit Bank of Nigeria
(CCBN)
Right. Sure. A fake name with a fake doctorate. And the “CC” in the CCBN might just as easily stand for Crooks and Criminals.
The scam was known at FinCen as a 419, named after a widely unenforced section of the Nigerian criminal code. Millions of these stinky little con jobs circulated across the globe each year, most emanating from West Africa.
They were all the same. They claimed that due to certain circumstances-disbursement of will proceeds, sale of a business, sale of cheap crude oil, a winning email address in an Internet lottery, or something similarly unlikely-a bank needed help to transfer this money to the lucky recipient’s account in the United States. If the recipient assisted them he or she would be entitled to a percentage of the funds.
If contacted, the scam artists would request thousands of dollars for various costs that were required before the lucky winner got the share of the funds. Of course, the victim’s payment went through but-surprise-the transfer of riches never happened.
The scam was as widespread as it was shameless. In 2002 the US Department of Justice had gained a court order to open all mail from Nigeria passing through JFK airport in New York. Around seventy-five percent had involved scam offers. Much of it even bore counterfeit postage.
And then there had been her nightmarish trip to Lagos the previous year. A mission from the United States Treasury had sought to present evidence that much of the swindling was being done with the apparent complicity of the Nigerian government.
The hosts in Lagos didn’t take well to that theory. While the Americans were meeting with representatives of the government, their hotel rooms were sacked and trashed. Their clothes were taken, their suitcases slashed, and death threats scrawled on the walls. Of five staff cars used by Treasury representatives and belonging to the US Embassy, three were stolen and one was chopped apart with a chain saw while their meeting was in progress. A fifth blew up, killing their Nigerian chauffeur.
So much for a little international fieldwork. Most members of the delegation felt lucky to touch down again physically unharmed on American soil.
Alex filed the paperwork before her. The 419s would be around for as long as people would fall for them. The fight against them would continue. But in the absence of follow-up at the source-when a foreign government might be aiding the perpetrators-they could only be contained, not defeated. Not that she was going to ignore them. She wasn’t above a personal vendetta or two for criminals who deserved to be put out of business. She had a long memory for such things and could be stubborn as a bulldog once she got her teeth into a case.
But she had more immediate dragons to slay. There was a messy business involving untaxed wine imports from France. There was a perplexing matter about some art stolen by the Nazis from a wealthy Jewish collector who had died in the Holocaust; a Swiss bank denied culpability despite the fact that a looted Pissarro had been hanging in the New York office of the bank president for the last thirty years. And then there was a whole sheaf of various non-419 Internet frauds that seemed to be associated with an online casino operation in Costa Rica.
If human beings invested the same ingenuity in eradicating disease and hunger that they did in swindling each other, the world might be a better place… and she might happily be in another line of work, one that would have put her on the front lines in the fight against worldwide oppression, ignorance, disease, hunger, and poverty, causes she felt were compatible with her guiding principles. Sometimes she thought she should have become a doctor. She would have been an excellent one and could easily have become one.
But human beings didn’t manifest such ingenuity and Alex hadn’t become a doctor. So she did what she could. She enjoyed sticking up for victims. Out in the field, she had several teams of investigators who worked for her. The day was young. It was time to see what cases were shaping up for arrests or prosecution. She dug in for a day of combat, matching wits with various crooks across the world and on the Internet.
THREE
The electronic surveillance team in Washington was a perfect combination of four elements: speed, efficiency, intelligence, and the refusal to ask questions. And today they even had one convenient coincidence tossed in.
Carlos was the tech guy and the lookout. He turned up in a uniform that bore the markings of one of the local cable companies. Janet was his cohort, but she arrived independently and in street clothes, which in this weather meant a parka, a denim mini, and woolen leggings. She looked like any other pretty young twenty-something. Their target this morning was an apartment in a residential complex on Calvert Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, opposite the sprawling art deco Shoreham Hotel, now the Omni Shoreham, and just a few blocks from the Woodley Park Metro station.
There was nothing special about the bugging. It was a routine job as long as the victim was at work. Tuesdays were good for this sort of thing.
Carlos arrived first, at about ten in the morning. He had the proper paperwork-routine maintenance on the cable system-and got a free pass from the building’s superintendent. He went to work in the basement, checking the cable lines, the phone lines, the power. He located the setups for the targeted apartment on the fifth floor.
Duck soup. This was easy.
On a previous visit Carlos had stolen a passkey that worked for all apartments. The black-bag keepers back at his agency congratulated him on his good work and made a copy. Carlos returned the original before anyone knew it was out of the building.
They had files back at the agency’s headquarters for hundreds of buildings and hotels in DC, completely legal under the classified sections of the Homeland Security Act of 2005. So this would be a snap as long as no one who really did work for the cable people turned up. But that didn’t happen this morning.
Carlos’s specialty was rigging radio frequencies to go through the main electrical wiring of the building. Then, from a car within two blocks, a tuner could hone in on the specific apartment and the “easy listening” was officially “on the air.” Carlos was never a listener. That was done by higher-ups.
Carlos moved quickly from the electric grid to the junction box for the telephones in Calvert Arms Apartments. He could see from the electronic blowback on the phone lines that most people used cordless phones, including his target. So Carlos dropped a chip on the fifth floor apartment he wanted.
Job done. He flipped open his cell phone and called Janet.
“I’m just about finished,” he said. “Got ten minutes?”
Two blocks away, she was sitting in a car cheerfully working Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2 on her PSP. “Sure,” she said. “See you on the flip side.”
Here was today’s happy coincidence: Janet’s uncle lived in the building. He was an overeducated but charming old coot who had worked for the State Department for the better part of three decades as a foreign service officer. He had served in numerous embassies in Europe and Latin America, as well as in the department’s building in Washington’s “Foggy Bottom” district, again alternating between European and Latin American affairs.
