Wired News notes:
Fifty-year-old Michael Lekara Wayid, Nigeria’s consul in the Czech
Republic, was shot dead by an unidentified 72-year-old Czech at the
Nigerian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday. According to police reports,
the suspect was a victim of the 419 scam, a thriving industry that
employs thousands of people around the world. The scammers successfully
manage to extort money from thousands of victims by promising them
compensation for assistance in moving funds from foreign countries to
banks in the United States.
The criminals typically make their money by extracting
ever-escalating sums of money for bribes, bank fees and the like from
their “business partners,” that is, the folks they scam. But according
to early reports in Nigerian and Czech newspapers, the gunman’s bank
account was drained after he gave the account number and other personal
details to someone posing as a senior Nigerian official.