type of fraud where the victim unknowingly engages in one way trade with the perpetrator
Scam letter posted within South Africa An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is a common scam. The scam works by promising the victim a large sum of money in return for a small upfront payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum. If a victim makes the payment, the fraudster either invents a series of further fees for the victim to pay or simply disappears.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) states that "An advance fee scheme occurs when the victim pays money to someone in anticipation of receiving something of greater value – such as a loan, contract, investment, or gift – and then receives little or nothing in return." There are many variations of this type of scam, including the Nigerian prince scam, also known as a 419 scam. It is popularly known as "yahoo yahoo" in Nigeria. The number "419" refers to the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code dealing with fraud. The scam has been used with fax and traditional mail and is now prevalent in online communications such as emails. Other variations include the Spanish Prisoner scam and the black money scam.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).