The 419 scam has become so ubiquitous in today's internet-driven society that it has become the provenance of late-night show monologues and stand-up routines. In case you're not familiar with the term, the 419 scam is also known as the Nigerian scam or the advance-fee scam, and if you've used e-mail in the past few years, you've probably gotten plenty of spam mail with the famous subject line, "Your assistance is needed" and the promise of fast and easy cash in exchange for bank account information.

The now-worldwide Nigerian scam started off as a small, local fraud, in which the con artist would mail out letters informing the victim, or mark, that a prince was looking to deposit a large amount of money in the mark's bank account, and would reward him for helping get the money out of the country. But mailing out letters was expensive and time-consuming, and didn't see the rapid influx of cash to make it anything more than a cottage industry.

The trick itself is actually based on a much older one, which goes back at least 300 years. The 18th Century French criminologist Eugène François Vidocq described a fraud trick called "the Letter from Jerusalem" in his memoirs. In this confidence trick, the con man would show the mark a letter from a rich person imprisoned in Jerusalem who promised to share his wealth with the mark if the mark would help provide funds to secure the prisoner's release.

This trick developed into the more refined and famous Spanish Prisoner con, which operated on the same principle. The con man would show the mark a letter from a man who claimed to know the whereabouts of a great treasure, but was unable to find it because he was locked away in prison. Should the victim provide the finances for the prisoner to bribe his guards, he would gladly share the treasure with the mark upon his release. Not only does this appeal to greed, but it also relied on the clandestine appeal of secrecy and adventure. The fantastic romanticism of the scam and the con man's appeals to the mark's honesty and upstanding qualities often precluded the mark telling anyone else about the trick.

But what truly made the Nigerian version of this age-old trick such a huge industry was the advent of the internet. Modern telecommunications technology and inexpensive internet harvesting software made the Nigerian fraud-mongers able to inexpensively mass-email potential victims. Even if only a small percentage of these people took the bait, the amount of money made could be staggering. And it was. In the past fifteen years, the Nigerian scam went from being a small, local fraud scheme which was essentially a cottage industry, to being one of Nigeria's biggest industries, copied all over the world.