Citibank nearly duped by Nigerian scam

Minyanville.com's headline probably puts it most bluntly: Citibank officially dumber than your spam filter. A Nigerian man, Paul Gabriel Amos, has been indicted in New York for allegedly attempting a fraud that would have pulled over $27 million from Citibank's coffers into two dozen receiving accounts around the world.

Citibank, which received $45 billion in Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) funds from the US government last year, did not perceive irregularities with the attempted withdrawal from the account of the National Bank of Ethiopia (a real bank). Instead, the scam was foiled only when some of the receiving banks warned Citibank that they were unable to process the transactions.

Amos (who also uses the aliases "Amos Paul" and "Paul Amos Gabrielle") and his unnamed co-conspirators are accused of forging signatures on various documents instructing Citibank to transfer money to accounts around the world, and to accept such requests via fax. Those documents included contact information, ostensibly for National Bank of Ethiopia officials but in fact reaching those co-conspirators, who "approved" the transfers by phone.

The scam was executed in several stages beginning during the second half of September 2008; the actual transfers were dated between approximately October 2 and October 16. The transfers, many of which were routed through JP Morgan Chase and Bank of New York, pointed to beneficiary accounts in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, China, Cyprus, and the US.

Amos, who was arrested in January during an attempt to enter the country from Singapore (his current country of residence), has pleaded not guilty to the charges. If convicted, he faces up to 30 years in prison.

In completely unrelated news, a Houston lawyer last month sued Citibank for not protecting him from losing $182,500 in yet another variation on the 419 scam. The loss in question occurred when Richard T. Howell's firm fell victim to a check-fraud scam after the bank reported a check as "cleared" before ascertaining that it was, in fact, bogus.