I read somewhere that every day there is an average of five people waiting in various London hotel lobbies for a courier to bring them millions of dollars. Like Godot, the courier never comes, because those waiting are victims of "the Nigerian scam", otherwise known as "the 419 scam" or "advance fee fraud".

This particular type of fraud started many years ago. Company directors or professional men would get letters from supposed Nigerian officials who claimed to have several millions of dollars they had made unofficially (the implication was by taking bribes) which they needed to get out of the country. If you could provide them with a bank account to use for this purpose then a proportion (typically 20%) of this money would become yours. If you fell for this story, your bank account might be cleaned out or you would soon be asked to provide one or more large payments up front to facilitate the transfer of the money. Once they had squeezed as much money out of you as they could, the trail went cold.

With the spread of e-mail, the "Nigerian" scam has burgeoned. The supposed country of origin no longer needs to be Nigeria (anyone with an anonymous Hotmail account can run such a fraud from anywhere and pretend to be from any country he or she likes). The current favourite scenario seems to be for the sender to pretend to be the wife, son or daughter of some prominent third-world politician who has been imprisoned or murdered by political opponents or revolutionaries. The writer has managed to spirit the victim's money out of the country (usually to Holland, for some reason) and wants, with your help, to get it to your country to invest it. Another hardy perennial is the supposed bank manager holding a multi-million deposit from a client who has died without leaving any next-of-kin. Now if you will only claim to be the client's relative, this sum can be transferred to your bank account ...

I seem to be on some kind of suckers' list and get one or two of these e-mails a week. See a sample selection of them, or go onto the Internet and type "Nigerian scam" into Google to find many pages on the subject. Some people make a hobby of running "reverse scams"; they string the fraudsters along in order to have fun while encouraging the scammers' own greed and credulity. One of the funniest and most prolific of these is Brad Christensen, who, for example, suggested to one scammer that in order to show that neither side had anything to hide, they should meet on a Dutch nudist beach clad only in orange socks. To another he requested that she sent her dental records - as authentication of her identity - by means of a photocopy of her teeth! Despite these risible suggestions the would-be fraudsters were slow to twig that they were being given the runaround! Another "scambaiting" site well worth visiting is www.419eater.com.