THE SCAMS CONTINUE:
The only thing that changes is the poor victims. Latimer’s Diary,
Hillfields history day
ADATE for your diary if you live in the Hillfields neighbourhood. The Hillfields Park estate was, as you may know, one of Bristol’s very first “garden suburbs” – the older and much nicer term used for council estates. Hillfields and Sea Mills were the first areas in Bristol where council tenants moved into their new homes in the years after WW1.
The centenary of the estate is being marked as part of the wider Bristol ‘Homes for Heroes 100’ celebrations and if you live in Hillfields (or lived there in the past) you might well want to pop into the Hillfields Library on Saturday week, April 6 between 11am and 5pm.
The event gives local folk a chance to find out more about the project and how to get involved. You can share memories and family stories (and maybe bring some old photos and other memorabilia along) and have a cup of tea and a bit of cake. You can also see the exhibition created by the Minerva primary school’s pupils, go on a guided walking tour and meet some of the earliest tenants. You can even have a go at designing your own council house!
It’s all free and there’s no need to book – just drop in. For more, see www. locallearning. org. uk/ hillfieldshomes-for-heroes
The Spanish Prisoner scam
» Ever since the dawn of email, everyone’s been getting messages prporting to come from a relative of some dead despot. A consequence, we are informed by this nice Christian lady, of the tyrant’s comeuppance is that the unlamented’s fabulous wealth lies in inaccessible bank accounts.
(Obviously, being hanged upside down from the outstretched arm of the Great Liberator in Glorious Struggle Plaza was richly deserved if you ask me, but the Honourable Mrs Doris Hitler, daughter of the late Godwin Hitler, the nowupended former Dear Leader and President-for-Life of the People’s Republic of Freedonia, doesn’t dwell on the matter.)
But with your help, she will be able to access this money, and she’s willing to punt you a hefty piece of the loot he extorted from his starving subjects.
Of course, Doris does not exist except in the mind of scammer working out of a cyber-café in Lagos, or a flat in Moscow, or an office in Bangalore – whatever.
Should you take the bait, you’ll be asked to deposit a few grand into a foreign bank account as fees to access the money. Pay up, and some “administrative difficulties” will arise which require the payment of further “fees”. In fact there will be administrative difficulties for as long as you’re willing to cough up the fees.
This is generally known as the “Nigerian 419” scam (as in Article 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, which covers fraud; though such scams don’t just come from Nigeria). It’s more generally known among criminologists as an “advanced fee” scam.
So far, so obvious. But now … Have you ever heard of the “Spanish Prisoner” fraud?
I certainly hadn’t until coming across it the other day. If you have, remind me never to lend you any money.
In the late 19th century, and well into the 20th century, people would receive letters out of the blue from individuals claiming to be wealthy and/or influential businessmen or politicians who had been imprisoned. Many of these said they were from people incarcerated in Spain, hence “Spanish Prisoner”.
Several gangs and individuals operated this con at different times, so there were many variations, but typically the letter would say how the prisoner had heard that the recipient (usually a well-to-do trader or businessman) was a shrewd and honest man of affairs.
If the recipient could help the “prisoner” get out of gaol by paying some fees, then he would be in for a big share in the prisoner’s large personal fortune, and quite possibly (this being the 19th century) his beautiful daughter’s hand in marriage as well.
There was a rash of these all over Europe in the 1890s. If you look through old newspapers you find hundreds of mentions of it. By 1900 it was clear that everyone knew the Spanish Prisoner scam as well as we know the Nigerian 419 today. It is now completely forgotten – but it was exactly the same thing!
It certainly came to Bristol. In 1899 the local papers were publishing examples of such letters that had been received around the area. These came from a “Spanish army officer” who was in prison for joining a rebellion, and needed help in getting hold of his money. And by the way, he had a lovely daughter who was in great distress.
Everyone at the time knew that only a mug would fall for it. And yet for years afterwards, well into the 1930s, variations on the Spanish Prisoner crop up again and again – so it must have worked some of the time.
In 1924 the Western Daily reported that a man from an unnamed town near Bristol was sued for the return of money he had borrowed to respond to a Spanish Prisoner scam.
In 1933 a Bristol businessman showed the press a letter he’d received asking his help in the recovery of 1.2m Pesetas from a left luggage office in a French railway station. The writer of the letter claimed he was in prison in Spain as a bankrupt. By now, though, the criminals were getting sloppy. In previous times the fraud letters would be carefully and plausibly written, often accompanied by carefully forged documentation. By the Thirties, they weren’t so elaborate; some letters were just run off on cheap paper on a printing press. As one observer put it: “The swindlers have grown more indolent, or perhaps more contemptuous of the intelligence of mankind.”
By the mid-1930s, Bristolians were even getting such letters from – yes! – West Africa. And they were written in that state of semi-literacy we’ve come to expect from modern email scams: “Dear unknow friend, I have the pleasure to write you these few lines just to say I was one day reading a certain newspapers and across your name and skill that your goods is better than all English people…”
And yet people were still falling for it. They’re obviously still falling for the Nigerian 419, too. Nobody would bother doing it if there weren’t still some suckers out there.
Nowt new under the sun, eh?
P.S. Dearly beloved in God, I have a billion Simoleons (about 1p English), the property of my father the late Roman Emperor Caligula, in a bank vault in the Democratic Republic of Henleaze. Half of this handsome inheritance* can be yours if you send Latimer’s Diary some Marks & Spencers richlyfruited hot cross buns.
*i.e. Nothing.
Cheers then!