Citibank Falls For Nigerian Scam, Almost Loses $27 Million

Giving us yet fewer reasons to trust banks, Citibank revealed it was successfully conned by Nigerian scammers. The good news: the transaction didn’t end up going through, so the money is safe. The bad news: Citibank is still run by morons.

We all remember the sad British postman who fell for the Nigerian scam twice, but at least he was just a humble postman, not a corporation responsible for billions of dollars of other people’s money. So how did the con artists fool Citibank? By pretending to be Ethiopia and asking really nicely, basically.

The ringleader, Paul Gabriel Amos, and his accomplices set up twenty-four false accounts while posing as officials from the National Bank of Ethiopia and then faxed Citibank a request for $27,000,000 total to be transferred amongst the twenty-four accounts. Citibank checked the signatures (with what, a Fisher Price ray-gun?!) and gave the thumbs-up for the transfer to go through. Luckily for Ethiopia and Citibank, the target banks couldn’t complete the transfer and that’s when Citibank contacted the actual Bank of Ethiopia and started to realize something sketchy was going on.

Amos was arrested when he tried to enter the U.S. and Citibank got the money back safely to the Bank Of Ethiopia, so Yay, but this isn’t doing much to improve our faith in American banks. Then again the value of “money” is just an arbitrary fantasy we all agree to believe in for convenience’s sake so…maybe that thought will take the sting out when we’re all bankrupt and eating cardboard in 2010?

419 scammer impersonates the nation of Ethiopia, takes $27 million from Citibank [Boing Boing]

Citibank tries to wire $27 million to Nigerian scammers [Ars Technica]