I’m starting to see a new variant on the infamous Nigerian email spam. In this version, the author is an African attorney who was planning to divert the assets of his late clients to his own account, contrary to their expressed desire to have their money sent to various Christian causes. But, upon having seen the light, accepted Jesus, etc. etc, he’s decided to pass the funds along to you, his fellow good Christian, who he found browsing American religious websites.

This is pretty clever: identify yourself as a co-religionists, and a lot of folk’s deeply ingrained trust circuits kick in automatically. The trust-promoting function of religious groups is, after all, likely one of the reasons the whole notion’s survivied as long as it has. One of the few cases I recall hearing about of someone falling for this notorious scam was a guy who lost a church account he was in charge of to the spammer… could it have been one of these cases?