One of the perpetual mysteries of spam is that we still get 419 spam. Surely by now everyone who has a pulse, let alone an email account, has heard about this kind of scam? And yet, day after day, the 419 spams keep rolling in because people, unaccountably, keep falling for them. A Californian man lost $750,000 to a prize-pitch scam last year; more recently, a British man lost £130,000 to scammers in a two-phase scam, where the second phase involved scammers pretending to be secret agents who claimed to be able to help him recover his stolen money.

I'm currently reading a book called “A Pickpocket's Tale”, by Timothy Gilfoyle. It's the story of a 19th-century New York criminal called George Appo, based on Appo's own memoir and a great deal of historical research. It's a very interesting read all round.

In the late 1880's, Appo began to work as a ‘steerer’ for a gang working what came to be known as the ‘green goods’ scam. This scam is now little known, but it had a long run. It was described by one writer as early as 1872, and there were reports of people being taken in by it at least as late as 1900. The newspaper The World reported in 1885 that the United States was ‘flooded’ with circulars advertising the scam.

The ‘green goods’ scam is a long con. ‘Writers’ would begin by sending out letters to potential victims in which they claimed to have counterfeit money (‘green goods’) for sale. When a sucker responded, they would begin a correspondence aimed at bringing the victim to a meeting place, where the ‘steerer’ would meet them and lead them to the location where the deal would take place. Once there, the ‘turner’ or ‘salesman’ would show the mark a large sum of real money, which they were told was counterfeit, and offer them the chance to buy it at profitable rates — perhaps $10,000 worth of this very convincing ‘counterfeit’ money for just $600. After the deal was done, a switch would take place. The bag containing the real money would disappear and the victim would be sent on his way with a bag of paper or sawdust.

The ‘green goods’ scam had some intriguing similarities to 419 and related scams. One is volume; according to Gilfoyle, some ‘green goods’ scammers would print up to 200,000 letters to advertise the scam, sending out as many as 15,000 a day. A key part of the scam was address harvesting: the scammers combed newspapers and business publications for the names and addresses of potential victims — either people who could be expected to have money, or people who had suffered losses and might be desperate to get some. (Early 419 scammers, who also began by sending paper letters, did something similar). And like the 419 scam, victims were aware that they were getting into something dubious; circulating counterfeit money on the one hand, and evading financial regulations on the other. Making the mark feel like an accomplice is a time-honored element of many scams, crucially reducing the willingness of the victim to go to the police.

There is evidence that victims of the scam were very suspicious of the men they were dealing with. On more than one occasion, Appo had to disarm men who drew guns. On one near-fatal occasion, he failed to do so and was shot in the head by a mark, losing an eye as a result. Moreover, the circulars sent out were written in a kind of oblique quasi-code, referring to ‘paper goods’ or even ‘cigars’ rather than banknotes. As with the kind of specialized language used in MLM schemes — ‘forced matrix’, ‘downline’ etc — suckers were expected to have enough familiarity with the scheme to be able to decipher the code, but not enough to make them unwilling to take part.

The ‘green goods’ scam flourished for more than 30 years, during which time it was extensively discussed and publicized. Many of the victims must have heard about the scam or been suspicious of the people they were dealing with, yet they fell for it anyway. Perhaps the only explanation is the one given by Appo's boss, James McNally, who said that the scam was “built upon the common desire in human nature to get something for nothing”.

More than a hundred years later, people still fall for Internet scams for the same reason.