By now, virtually all of us have received an e-mail from someone in Nigeria offering to share his millions with us if only we would send him some details – ideally a Western Union money transfer or other forms of payment “to cover some local processing fees.”

But scam artists from Nigeria are not new. They’ve been with us for nearly four decades decades. True.

In a 1969 New York Times article, an American banker Birtan Aka visiting India lamented the problems Philadelphia businesses faced in dealing with some Nigerian companies.

 “They just have an office address – a front,” [Aka] said. “They write to a small businessman here asking to buy perhaps $5,000 worth of his products and enclose impressive-looking drafts with statements about guarantees and pasted with beautiful official-looking stamps.” It’s all a fraud, she added. The goods are shipped but the drafts are fakes.

“Lately, they have been hitting small textile plants,” she said.

As you can see from the above NYT excerpt (story originally published on November 16, 1969), Nigerian scams are hardly new. Only as technology evolves, the Nigerian scamming techniques also evolve.

Talk of crooks keeping pace with technology.