She was gullible -- gullible and had access to $2.1 million
• Wishful Thinking
The Nigerian scam predates the popularity of email. We've been getting letters in the mail for years at my bookshop.
He introduced himself as Dr. Mbuso Nelson.
He said he was an official with the Ministry of Mining in Pretoria, South Africa.
And he offered to pay a $4.5-million fee to a 59-year-old Rochester Hills woman if she would help him transfer $18 million from South Africa to a bank account in the United States.
But what Ann Marie Poet did next gave new meaning to the so-called Nigerian scam letter fraud, the FBI said.
The FBI said Poet, a bookkeeper for a small Berkley law firm, embezzled $2.1 million from the firm's accounts between February and August, after scam organizers persuaded her to wire huge amounts of money to bank accounts in South Africa and Taiwan to expedite the transfer of money to the United States.