American Postal Service agents have discovered counterfeit cheques, lottery tickets and e-Bay overpayment documents worth $2.1 billion while investigating a scam involving some Nigerians and a US citizen.
PCworld.com reports that a cyber investigator with the US Postal Service, Chris Siouris, told a recent conference in Seattle, United States that the discovery was made when the agency sent 15 postal investigators to Lagos on a three-month undercover operation.
Washington State Attorney-General, Rob McKenna, who also spoke at the conference said they were pushing for ways to better educate Internet users to avoid e-mail scams.
The report said that an American woman, Edna Fiedler, was sentenced on Wednesday to two years in prison and five years of supervised release for her role in the Internet counterfeit cheque scheme.
The report said that Fiedler, who is from Washington, had pleaded guilty in March to attempting to defraud US citizens in connivance with suspected accomplices in Nigeria. She connived with them to send fake cheques to people who had agreed to cash them on behalf of the sender, keeping some of the proceeds and sending the rest back.
The report, which quoted the US Department of Justice, said the Nigerian accomplices found people willing to cash the fake checks via e-mail. They sent their names as well as fake documents that looked like Wal-Mart money orders, Bank of America checks, US Postal Service checks and American Express traveler�s checks to Fiedler, telling her how to fill out the checks and where to send them.
The Justice Department said the recipients most likely thought they were helping out someone who needed a person in the US to cash a cheque for them. It added that they then got the money by cashing the cheques and sending most of it to either Fiedler or her Nigerian accomplices. However, once the cheques were discovered to be fake, the people who cashed them were made to repay the full amount.
In all, Fiedler sent out US$609,000 worth of phony cheques and money orders. When US Secret Service agents investigating the case searched Fiedler�s house, they found additional fake cheques worth more than $1.1 million that she was preparing to send out.