I just found an interesting site about Nigerian scams. The site has some history, it has a bibliography of books on the subject, it has an archive of example emails, and it tracks people who seem to be fraud artists. While the site at times seems to have an amateur side it has a lot of information.
I must admit that I’m interested in this as I’ve begun to think of spam as a form of creative writing. Spammers have to tell a story that will entice people to start up a dialogue so that they can ask for an advance. Who writes these stories? What sorts of people maintain the dialogue? What do these stories tell us about ourselves? Why Nigeria?