A MyBroadband researcher recently played along with an obvious advance-fee scam email and gained insight into how these con-men trick victims into parting with their hard-earned money.
Advance-fee scams, also known as 419-scams, are when a con artist get victims to pay them a fee with the promise of a large payday afterwards.
Examples of hooks used by such scams are that you have won a foreign lottery, inherited money from a long-lost relative, or that an exiled prince needs to use your bank account to funnel money from his home country.
We created a new Gmail address for this test and always used a VPN when accessing this account to ensure none of our real information was accidentally leaked to the scammer.
