A study of the problem by people who can count!

It is usually not in the interests of anyone reporting on phinshing, spam and crime in general to give accurate figures. Daily Mail scribblers looking for eveidence of falling skies, policemen looking for bigger budgets, civil servents looking to add more small print to thier regulations, polititians looking to intrude further into your private life all exagerate thier figures shamelessly, basing thier claims on the already exagerated figures of other hysterics.

Well done guys.

The amounts may be small by the western standards (a couple of medium size fraudsters steal more). However it may be quite a lot by the standards of other economies from where phishing operations are actually run.

I recently received an email from a very nice Nigerian gentleman who ASSURED me he had $21,000,000 that needed 'liberating' from his country of birth and he would be happy to part with 20% if all I would do is provide a UK bank account into which it would be deposited.

It is hard (although not impossible) to believe anyone would still be taken in by such a ruse, but those emails keep coming: "Dear Honourable Smith, I am a former Prince..."

Not only are people still taken in by such a ruse, some of them actually seek it out. Almost every week, there are a few morons who see this story:

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/09/nigerian_millions.html and write to the author asking how to contact Mr. Ayele, even though the article clearly states "This article is a work of satire. Please do not send your sad stories."

Paris, because even she has more of a clue than that.

Yes ungrammatical and misspelt sentences that any moderately organised thief should have avoided by running their email through a word processor first.Apparently you don't need functioning intelligence to do the IT stuff, the fake web page, which much phishing requires.

I'm just sitting here waiting for my African millions to start rolling in.

Any day now!

I've been assured that the FBI owe me 7.5 million dollars, all I have to do is contact drjames_centraldesk@live.com, and he will arrange it for me.

Surely the FBI aren't dodgy?

Oooops... Never mind

Very thought provoking. Everything else I've seen on phishing losses goes soemthing like "look how many phishing sites there are, they must be making bazillions." The article actually looks hard at the data. The observation low skill jobs pay like low skill jobs makes a lot of sense to me.