Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Spanish Prisoner. A newspaper clipping from 1904, detailing the attempted Spanish Prisoner scamming of a McKeesport, Pennsylvania man. The Spanish Prisoner is a confidence trick originating by at least the early 19th century, as Eugène François Vidocq described in his memoirs. [1][2]
Currently it is unclear how far back the origin of scam letters date. The oldest reference to the origin of scam letters could be found at the Spanish Prisoner scam. This scam dates back to the 1580s, where the fictitious prisoner would promise to share non-existent treasure with the person who would send him money to bribe the guards.
The Spanish Prisoner scam—and its modern variant, the advance-fee scam or "Nigerian letter scam"—involves enlisting the mark to aid in retrieving some stolen money from its hiding place. The victim sometimes believes they can cheat the con artists out of their money, but anyone trying this has already fallen for the essential con by ...
The great-great granddaddy to the Nigerian prince scam dates back to the 19th century when a version known as the Spanish Prisoner scam lured marks into sending money to a con artist posing as an ...
Budget. $10 million [1] Box office. $13.8 million [1] The Spanish Prisoner is a 1997 American neo-noir suspense film, written and directed by David Mamet and starring Campbell Scott, Steve Martin, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ben Gazzara, Felicity Huffman and Ricky Jay. It tells a story of corporate espionage conducted through an elaborate confidence game.
Email fraud (or email scam) is intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual using email as the vehicle. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to de fraud people, just as telephony and paper mail were used by previous generations. Email fraud can take the form of a confidence ...
Scam letter posted within South Africa. An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is one of the most common types of confidence tricks.The scam typically involves promising the victim a significant share of a large sum of money, in return for a small up-front payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum.
This type of scam, originally known as the "Spanish Prisoner Letter", has been carried out since at least the 16th century via ordinary postal mail. From the article Spanish Prisoner : The Spanish Prisoner is a confidence game dating back to at least the 17th century. Ok so given the word "at least" the two statements are not actually ...