  The malaise of electronic spam mail that solicit illicit partnership using
bogus business proposals (popularly called 419 mails) remained unabated on the
internet despite concerted efforts. In addition to these are the emergence and
prevalence of phishing scams that use social engineering tactics to obtain
online access codes such as credit card number, ATM pin numbers, bank account
details, social security number and other personal information (22). In an age
where dependence on electronic transaction is on the increase, the web security
community will have to devise more pragmatic measures to make the cyberspace
safe from these demeaning ills. Understanding the perpetrators of internet
crimes and their mode of operation is a basis for any meaningful effort towards
stemming these crimes. This paper discusses the nature of the criminals engaged
in fraudulent cyberspace activities with special emphasis on the Nigeria 419
scam mails. Based on a qualitative analysis and experiments to trace the source
of electronic spam and phishing emails received over a six months period, we
provide information about the scammers personalities, motivation, methodologies
and victims. We posited that popular email clients are deficient in the
provision of effective mechanisms that can aid users in identifying fraud mails
and protect them against phishing attacks. We demonstrate, using state of the
art techniques, how users can detect and avoid fraudulent emails and conclude
by making appropriate recommendations based on our findings.
