Is a Promise to a 419 Scammer Enforceable?
posted by Dave Hoffman
Via Andrew Sullivan, I read this not work-safe, and often offensive, site purporting to be the record of correspondence between two satirizing vigilantes and a Prince Soki Mobutu, a scam artist. As Sullivan notes, the two email vigilantes respond to Mobutu’s offer of a hidden hoard of loot from the Congo with the following enticing line: “Hello. My name is Mike. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner but I haven’t checked my email in awhile. Your proposal sounds very interesting to me and I want to help . . . I work in the music industry. I’m hoping to cut an album with my boy B-Smooth later next month. I was thinking that if I helped you get this money, then I would have enough to cover our expenses and even make a music video. What do you think?” We can imagine the recipient of this message, in some dingy internet cafe (My bet: in south Jersey), chuckling with evil glee. Little did s/he know.
The two guys who run the site have apparently made it their business to sucker email scam artists into counter-traps, getting them to pose holding various silly messages as the last step before they promise to send cash. In this particular correspondence chain, the two purported rappers, after some Ali-G-like nonsense dialogue, pretend to have flown to Europe to meet Mobutu, then Spain, and to they have wired money, after they got Mobutu to perform various tasks. The most significant task was to have someone posing as Mobutu to send a picture of himself wearing t-shirt with an obscene message on it. It is actually really funny. If you can handle nasty, off-color, satire, go ahead and read it. It might take a while, especially if you read the lyrics to the fake raps.
My human side here is happy for a victory over scam artists. My lawyer side wonders: if you promise a scam artist that if s/he does X, you will provide him cash Y in return for the counter-promise of more cash Z, are you contractually bound when (a) your first promise is a joke, that reasonable English-speakers would understand but foreign-born speakers might not; (b) his/her return promise to do X is not a joke, and, in fact, was apparently performed; and (c) his/her return promise to obtain cash Z is almost certainly fraudulent?
Of course, part c here probably turns the analysis. Fraud is always a good defense to contractual enforcement.
But let’s say that in fact this is that rare actual heir of an real fortune, who for some reason, as the exchange tells us, will provide “10% of the total sum if you assist me in claiming the fund from the security vault in Holland where my father deposited the box containing the fund as gemstones, gold, and jewelry before his death.” At least this possibility isn’t, strictly speaking, impossible. Under such circumstances, traditional American law would probably find a contract early in the process, and certainly when “Mobutu” get photographed wearing the message on the t-shirt. Lawyers, and students, might think that this looks like false consideration, misled by the common classroom hypothetical of a homeless person being asked to go to a thrift store. But if you read the exchange, that particular hypothetical quickly becomes distinguishable. (The key bit of the exchange comes right before a description of a violent incident at a Krispy Kreme franchise involving a “dougnut mixing spoon.”)
So, the moral of the story is: check the bona fides of a scam artist you wish to counter-scam.
March 16, 2006 at 12:06 am
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond
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