Introduction

      The most instructive, indeed the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitude of fortune, is to recall the catastrophe of others.

      — Polybius

      In 2008, a self-employed handyman named Fred Haines was wandering around Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower airport in search of a Nigerian man carrying two chests full of cold hard cash. After asking around and waiting for an hour or so he finally realized the $64 million inheritance he was promised in an email from Nigeria wasn’t walking off an airplane.

      Over a period from 2005 to 2008, Haines mortgaged his home three times in hopes that forking over six figures of cash would be enough to help him receive a seven-figure inheritance from Africa. It’s hard to believe the Nigerian Prince scam could be so effective but some people just want to believe these things could be true. Haines claims the first email he received did come off as some sort of joke or scam. Nevertheless, he was intrigued as the person on the other end of his correspondence promised Haines he was owed tens of millions of dollars of an inheritance that rightfully belonged to him. The scammers told Haines his money was being moved from country to country but they needed money along the way to grease the wheels of international law that were overseeing the movement of his funds.

The scammers said at one point that the money had gone from Nigeria to Egypt to England to New York and once again back to Nigeria. Haines claims to have tried to get back the money after he sent it, but after going so deep down this rabbit hole he had convinced himself it couldn’t be a scam. “It got to the point where they were showing me that the president of Nigeria had sent me a letter. It had his picture on it and everything,” Haines said. “I looked it up on the computer to see what the Nigerian president looked like, and it was him.”

      Then there was the email he received from Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI at the time, and a man who is now widely known for conducting an investigation of some sort on the 45^th President of the United States. The subject line of this email read:

      Subject: Fred Haines, Code B-Dog

      The text showed a picture of Mueller in the top left-hand corner and was littered with grammatical errors. It read:

      I receive your email and for your good and successful of operation of your account, I will advise you to look for the fee and send to them you can see that your funds is available, and everything is clear no trick on it. Looks for some one [sic] and borrow then promise to pay in three days.

      You may be shocked to learn FBI Director Robert Mueller didn’t actually send an email to a man in Kansas about a secret inheritance from a Nigerian prince. This was, in fact, a fake. The problem was Haines had already gone too far to give up at that point, so he held out a glimmer of hope the money was still coming. “Those Nigerians know how to talk,” was his explanation for getting caught up in this fantasy. Luckily, Haines was able to recover $110,000 of what he lost in a settlement with Western Union, but others haven’t been so lucky.^[1]

       The Airplane Game

      In the late-1980s a money-making scheme called the Airplane Game was invented and the rules were quite simple. All you had to do was hand over $1,500 and the game would, in turn, give you back $12,000. What a world, right?

The reason it was called the Airplane Game is that every new player became one of eight “passengers” on a flight that also consisted of four flight attendants, two co-pilots, and a pilot. All eight passengers put in their $1,500 which went directly to the pilot as their cost of admission on the “flight.” The pilot then left the game having already put in their own initial $1,500 and working their way up the ladder. The co-pilot then started two new planes, where each passenger was required to bring on a new passenger (and thus $1,500 more per person). After each successive round, the passengers moved up to flight attendants and then became pilots themselves after a turn as co-pilot, picking up their $12,000. And the more people you brought into the game, the faster you earned your payout.^[2]

      This idea spread quickly to other areas across