Graham Harman has a post about an email scam he received claiming to be from a known contact, but obviously not actually from them. He does a thorough analysis of why it is a scam.

I’ve received a variant of this one in the past. The thing I’m most interested in about email scams is their geographies – there were the initial ones from Nigeria, of course, but I’ve had ones claiming to be from US servicemen who’ve managed to smuggle money out of Iraq or Afghanistan, widows of countless minor African politicians, something asking for donations to Haiti, and if I remember right, one following the Kosovo conflict. When they are done (reasonably) well there is a kind of logic to their timing, though many are completely indiscriminate. Has anyone ever written on the geographies of email scams?