BOOKDESIGN · 2014

Post aus Nigeria

The title of the book “Post aus Nige­ria” (engl. “Let­ters From Nige­ria”) could be also a plau­si­ble title for an exhi­bi­tion of a let­ter-friend­ship. The let­ters from the Nige­ria-Con­nec­tion called Scam, are actu­al­ly writ­ten friend­ly but they are only inter­est­ed in “let­ter-friend­ships” to cred­u­lous peo­ple. Scam-mails are e‑mails from pre­tend­ed busi­ness­men who are try­ing to coz­en their addressees to work with them for the trans­ac­tion of a sum of millions.

The catch­pen­ny is the gen­er­ous reward for the accep­tor. As soon as inter­est is shown the trick­ster gives notice that there is a trou­ble to fin­ish the deal. Those trou­bles can only be solved with a finan­cial aid of the busi­ness-part­ner. If the trick­ster gets paid to “solve the prob­lem“ he enriched him­self because the sum of mil­lions doesn’t even exist.

Accord­ing to sta­tis­tics of the „Inter­net Threads Trend Report 2013” 54 mil­lions of those have been send­ing dai­ly. And each of us had already been con­tact­ed by them by check­ing our e‑mail-spam-account. This book deals with the back­ground of the Nige­ria-Con­nec­tion and gives an insight of the vari­ety and struc­ture of those scam-mails with about 1000 letters.

Pub­lished on:
dmig-logo Design made in Ger­many — 07.2014

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Infor­ma­tion chapter

In the first chap­ter the back­ground of the Nige­ria-Con­nec­tion gets explained. What’s behind it? What are the rea­sons? How do those peo­ple live?

II. Col­lec­tion

The core of the book is the col­lec­tion. On almost 200 pages 1000 let­ters of the Nige­ria-Con­nec­tion are print­ed off on 60g/m² paper. They give an insight into the vari­ety and cre­ativ­i­ty of frauds. From the new-rich wid­ow to the trust­wor­thy pas­tor. Some of the quotes are high­light­ed in the text-box­es to make it eas­i­er for the read­er to get into this topic.

How it’s done

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1. Col­lect­ing 1000 Scam-Mails
We all know these kind of mails from our e‑mail spam-fold­er. I col­lect­ed 1000 of them to ana­lyze the content.

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2. Spot­ting the differences
I searched for the vari­ables that dif­fers each scam mail. Date, greet­ing, con­fi­dence build­ing adjectives, …

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3. Auto­mat­ed formatting
By writ­ing und using codes like this, all of my col­lect­ed mails got high­light­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly (GREP-styles in Indesign).

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4. Styling 1000 Mails
Country‑, money‑, date‑, cur­ren­cy- or con­fi­dence-build­ing-relat­ed text are for­mat­ed with sev­er­al text styles to high­light the differences.

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What if …

What if scam­mers actu­al­ly had pro­fes­sion­al help to fraud peo­ple? For the reader’s enter­tain­ment I cre­at­ed 10 let­ters that sup­port the sto­ry of the fraud. Many fraud­sters are claim­ing to die soon in the hos­pi­tal. So hand­writ­ting on the hospital’s notepad would look quite authen­tic for this story …

III. Amuse­ment

Aside of the trag­i­cal­ly vic­tims of fraud those let­ters hide a huge amount of humor. In the last chap­ter the fraud tricks of the Nige­ria-Con­nec­tion are get­ting bust­ed. One exam­ple of them is “the hope­less”, who men­tions right in the Scam-Mail, that this mail isn‘t scam at all.