I was working at McAfee Associates in 1990 when I had my first encounter with a so-called Nigerian 419 (aka advance-fee fraud) scammer. It was not delivered through email but came to the office as a hand-typed letter from Nigeria in the postal mail. In those days, we received letters every day via postal mail or fax asking for support, to request a quote, and all the other things email is used for today. Letters from Africa were a rarity though, and it was with great interest that the half-dozen or so employees gathered around the front of the office to read it.

While I don't remember the exact wording, I do remember the rough, thin paper it was typed on, and all in uppercase. The ribbon must have been so worn the letters appeared more purple than black. In this fragile letter, we were told how the writer, a confidant of someone in the oil ministry, wished for us to open bank accounts for the purpose of transferring funds from the Ministry, for which we would receive a commission.

As we passed the letter around, reading sections of it aloud, it seemed that none of us had ever heard of such a thing. By the time it had made it back into John McAfee's hands, he declared he knew it was fraud of some kind but was not sure exactly which kind. He stared at the letter for about 30 seconds, and finally, announced that he had figured out the scam—once we provided the con man with our banking information, they would then forge a request to wire the money out of the account, transferring it into another account, from which it would be withdrawn and disappear. In short, it was likely a classic advance-fee scam, where we would provide a small amount of money up front in exchange for being paid a fee to help launder a larger sum.

While it may not have been completely accurate, it was not a bad guess at all, especially considering none of us had ever heard of this scam before. We never responded. After all, why would we? We were a computer security company, and this threat was clearly not a computer virus. In the end, the letter was pinned to a cork board above the coffee machine at the back of the office.

A few months later, during a routine conversation with the FBI, I mentioned the letter. The agent was very familiar with these scams. Apparently, they were more common than any of us at McAfee Associates then knew, and many people had lost thousands of dollars by wiring money to Nigeria. As the internet wouldn't become ubiquitous for another half-decade or so, there was little awareness of these types of social engineering scams, which at that point had already been occurring for seventy years from Nigeria. As for the letter, since we moved offices nearly every 12 months while I was there, it got lost in the shuffle pretty quickly.

So, what does this anecdote tell us? Well, for one thing it shows us the unintended consequences of technologies once they become commonplace. It may seem downright bizarre to the reader that a security software company wouldn't have had any interest in social engineering scams, other than mere curiosity, let alone scramble to provide some level of protection; three decades ago, such social engineering scams did not have the advantage of spreading over the internet, just by mail and possibly fax.