Timeless Scams
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
The letter began: “Dear Sir, Although I know you only from good references of your honesty, my sad situation compels me to reveal to you an important affair in which you can procure a modest fortune, saving at the same time that of my darling daughter.”
Dated April 3, 1914, the letter was ostensibly sent by Serge Solovieff, an embezzler and murderer in prison in Spain, to my great-uncle Charles Seltzer, in his 20s, living in Philadelphia, and just starting his career as an architect. I found the letter and a related newspaper clipping in a box of his belongings when he died in 1970. I was intrigued.
The clipping said that Solovieff, a banker in St. Petersburg, had embezzled over five million rubles, murdered a compatriot in Spain, been apprehended in London, and extradited to Spain. The money was still missing. There was no date on the clipping, but the item on the reverse side was a review of an issue of the London Quarterly on the centenary of Tennyson’s birth (1909). It’s hard to imagine reviewing a magazine long after it was published, but the letter was dated 1914 — five years later.
Why would anyone keep a clipping from an English newspaper for five years in a prison in Spain, and then send it to a total stranger in the U.S., with a letter asking for help? Was this a hoax that someone tried to play on my great-uncle? What was there to gain?
In an effort to identify this Solovieff, I searched in microfilms of English newspapers from that time. I soon reached a dead end.
Thirty years later, when the Internet was available, I included the text of the letter and of the clipping in an article that I posted at my Web site. The page got included in search engines, so people looking for the name Serge Solovieff or phrases in the letter or clipping found my page and contacted me. This is a random research technique that I call flypaper — posting content on the Web so people with similar interests will find you and bring you the information you need when there is no way to actively find that information.
As a result of that posting, I was contacted by half a dozen people who possessed nearly identical letters and clippings that were addressed to their relatives just before or during World War I. One of them had a second letter as well. Her great-uncle took the bait. He sent a cable to Spain in 1913 and received an 11-page letter, a masterpiece of persuasive deception, detailing how to get to Spain and what to do to retrieve the fortune.
I told this story to an old friend, Ashley Grayson. He told me that variations on this scam, popularly known as The Spanish Prisoner, have been around for a long time. He pointed me to the movie The Spanish Prisoner, written by David Mamet and starring Campbell Scott, Ben Gazzara, and Steve Martin. That movie, which portrays an elaborate confidence game, includes the following passage, which is the source of its title: “It’s an interesting setup, Mr. Ross. It’s the oldest confidence game on the books. The Spanish Prisoner… Fellow says, he and his sister, wealthy refugees, left a fortune in the Home Country. He got out. The girl and the money are stuck in Spain. Here is her beautiful portrait. And he needs money to get her and the fortune out. Man who supplies the money gets the fortune and the girl. Oldest con in the world.”
Ashley also connected this scam to the Internet-based Nigerian Letter. (For details, see http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/ ) I myself receive an average of two variants of this letter every day. My email inbox seems to be a magnet for such messages.
Here’s how the scam operates: the target receives an unsolicited message, purportedly from Nigeria, containing a money laundering proposal. Sometimes there’s a “bequest” left you in a will or someone has a lot of currency that needs to be “chemically cleaned” before it can be used. The variations are creative and numerous.
I’ve received copies of documents from six instances of this scam, with almost identical introductory articles and clippings but with different handwriting on all of them and with two different names for the sender. These letters range in date from 1911 to 1914. They were sent to individuals from Maryland to Washington State, who apparently had nothing in common and apparently had no previous connections with Spain. I have no clues as to how the victims were chosen or how the senders got their addresses.
My best guess is that hundreds, if not thousands of these letters were sent to random recipients, like modern email spam, and that enough of these recipients took the bait to make this a profitable venture — one to be tried again and again and to be passed along from one schemer to another. Impediments to trans-Atlantic travel brought on by World War I may have brought The Spanish Prisoner to an end. In any case, it’s probable that the perpetrators were never caught.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were similar scams in Roman times. The vendors outside the Colosseum in Rome today probably resemble the vendors who preyed on tourists at the same spot 2000 years ago. And there were probably sketch artists at the Pyramids in ancient times, drawing pictures of tourists on camelback just as their descendants take photos today.
To me, the commonality and continuity of human vulnerability to scammers and peddlers is reassuring — it reinforces my feelings of community with humanity through the ages.
