Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
The message in her e-mail informed Janella Spears that she had some serious money coming if she’d only help with the affairs of a long-lost relative.
Several years later Spears, 60, of Sweet Home, says she is out nearly half a million dollars after falling victim to the “Nigerian Advance Fee Scheme,” a scam that often pops up in e-mails.
Spears, a registered nurse, is a nursing administrator and translator for the deaf and is married to a deaf man. She teaches CPR classes for the deaf and is ordained as a minister so she can perform weddings and funerals for the deaf.
She said she’d never heard of the Nigerian scam before she fell victim to it, but she had heard the name that the scam artists sent in their initial e-mail to her in August of 2005.
The message promised her $20.5 million if she would help the senders handle the estate of a J.B. Spears and his son, Charles Spears, who had died in a car accident, she said.
“Charles Spears is in our family,” she said. “That’s what piqued my interest. I’d done some research on my genealogy for a college class and I knew Charles.”
Her husband’s grandfather had a brother named Charles and since her husband’s father had died before her husband was born, “there were some blanks in the family history,” Spears said.
The e-mail’s sender, Joseph Odeh, said he was an attorney who had been searching for two years for J.B. and Charles’ relatives and had decided to take his search abroad.
He sent Spears copies of Charles’ death certificate and other documents, all of which appeared to be genuine, she said. Odeh said Charles had been a tool and die maker, which rang true from what Spears had learned from her research, she said.
“That gave me confidence because since the names matched and the occupation matched, that’s when I continued on,” she said.
The scam artists also sent official-looking documents and certificates from the Central Bank of Nigeria and from the United Nations, saying her payment was “guaranteed.”
Spears said that when the “attorney” tried to transfer the money to the United States, though, things got tricky. She was told that the transfer had to go through a French bank due to government regulations and that she would have to pay taxes on the money.
She said she resisted, arguing that she shouldn’t have to pay for something she hadn’t received.
“I said I needed them to send the money straight to me and they said no, they would get a Swiss bank involved,” she said. “I did not fight that one.”
Spears sent $100 through an untraceable wire service, as the scam artists directed, she said. More promises of multimillion-dollar payments followed as long as she sent more money – for couriers, customs payoffs and bank fees.
She said purported shipments of money included tracking numbers that, when she plugged them into Web sites, showed that her money was en-route, usually until it got to New York. Then, she said, it would get stuck at a train station or at an airport or in customs.
Once, she said, she drove to Portland to collect a purported shipment, only to be told by the scammers that the money had been sent to Portland, Maine.
Spears said she mortgaged her house, took a lien on the family car and used up her husband’s retirement account – eventually spending some $400,000.
Her family and bank officials warned her it was a hoax, but she persisted because she became obsessed with getting paid, she said.
Sweet Home Police Chief Bob Burford said that it’s easier to fall victim to scams than one might think.
“Your first reaction might be astonishment that someone would fall for such a hoax,” he said. “But remember, people get caught up in the moment and want to believe their ship has come in.”
Spears said she has talked with both the Sweet Home police and the FBI, but both simply took a report.
Burford said officers have visited Spears’ home twice in 2007 and that police believe she has been involved in two separate scams.
Spears said the Oregon Department of Justice has three boxes of paperwork she’s collected from her Nigerian experience.
Bill Gray, a special agent with the department’s Criminal Justice Division, said that so many people are taken by this type of scam that “it’s too many (cases) to work.
“There’s very little we can do, unfortunately,” he said. “It’s just one of those deals that’s hard to get a handle on, especially as local investigators.”
When word of her problems got out, a KATU-TV reporter did a story that has drawn attention from media across the nation, primarily newspapers, Spears said. She said she got a call from a Florida radio station on Monday morning that wanted to interview her.
Spears said she has contacted the police in Nigeria, who have pledged to get her money back.
She said she has talked with an investigator named Mr. Williams who said she really does have a $25 million inheritance. She said she hired an attorney who went to court in Nigeria to prove that she was “the correct Spears.”
“I paid the costs for that,” she said.
Mr. Williams recently sent her an e-mail, she said, that promised to get back the money she’s already spent if she would donate her inheritance to “needy children in Africa.”
“I don’t know,” she sighed.
Spears estimates it will take six years to clear the debt she accumulated, working with Money Management International, a nonprofit organization that helps people who have gotten into financial trouble.
“The problem is I’ve done more because nobody helped me,” she said, adding that the police in Nigeria and “at least 10 other people told me they were going to help me. It just comes to nothing.”
She said the offers for help included a Sen. David Mark from Nigeria, who contacted her and “told me he was going to make it right.”
She said when she checked him out on-line, a Web page showed his credentials.
But later his name was added to a scam warning Web site, she said.
“It keeps on going on and on and on,” she said.
Gray said he suspects that everyone in Nigeria with whom Spears has communicated, including the “police,” are bogus.
“Everything’s a scam,” he said.
Burford offered one final word of warning: “Perhaps your parents gave you the best advice: If something looks too good to be true…”