Who falls for Nigerian frauds?

You know the ones: so-and-so is a wealthy and desperate Nigerian (a deposed monarch, in some cases) who needs a trustworthy foreigner to help him smuggle millions out of the country. If only the foreigner would help by advancing some nominal sums for expenses, the foreigner would reap a substantial chunk of the at-risk millions.

The whole thing sounds so preposterous, I can't believe people have fallen for it. Yet as noted by Barbara Mikkelson at snopes.com, a lot of people have. They probably still do.

LongReads resurrected a 2006 New Yorker piece by Mitchell Zuckoff profiling John Worley, a psychotherapist who fell hard for the Nigerian scam. Kind of ironic, a specialist in human behavior succumbing to a pretty basic manipulation of human behavior, but there it is.

I was struck by a plaint of Worley's wife:

“They knew they couldn’t go after the Nigerians, so they just get the person they can reach. They’re trying to stop people in America from getting involved in it by making an example of my husband,” she said. “Why don’t they assign an F.B.I. agent to go after the people who scammed my husband? Where’s the justice?”

Is she kidding?

Granted that at the time she said all that, she had just dropped her husband off to start his two-year prison sentence. That, and the large financial toll the whole affair took (and probably is still taking) on them, must have been terribly difficult to bear, and for both she has my sympathy.

But her husband's role was neither passive nor carried out under duress. He didn't break U.S. laws to end genocide or to rescue orphans. He was after a substantial chunk of cash. There's nothing wrong with wanting cash, but there's a lot wrong with breaking or helping to break domestic and foreign laws to get it.

That's where the justice is.

I want to see the Bernie Madoffs of the world get their just deserts, too. But sometimes, justice is imperfect. And sometimes, you can't control a disease by killing the germs: you have to make the population immune to it. If jailing John Worley inoculates a few people against this particular brand of corruption, society will be the better for the experience.