Every improvement in technology leads to a new way of parting people from their money, and it appears gullible victims can still be found after at least 150 years of swindling.
One of the first technological advances that allowed direct communication to individuals occurred in the 19th century. In the 1840s Britain introduced a pre-paid national postal service and the ‘Penny Black’ postage stamp, you could post a letter to anyone and expect it to be delivered. Shortly thereafter, this new service was being used to scam unsuspecting victims, and as similar postal services were established in other countries, the scam spread.
The ‘Spanish Prisoner’, as the name suggest, was operated by criminals based in Spain. Using trade directories to obtain names and addresses of people, they sent out hundreds of letters across Britain spinning a tale of a person held in a Spanish prison. In other parts of the world, similarly close, but difficult to access places became the location of the ‘prison’.
Generally, the story was that a former military officer was being held prisoner in a Spanish prison. He wrote that his father or grandfather was English, but he had entered the military of service of Spain and had been wrongly accused of stealing money. He was now seriously ill and was in fear of death.
He would announce that he had a daughter who needed looking after and in his Will had appointed the recipient of the letter to be his daughter’s guardian. Furthermore, he had a large sum of money hidden away which needed to be recovered from a secret location. Once the victim responded sympathetically to what they thought was a sincere and truthful story, money would be requested to pay for the daughter’s travel expenses, etc. All totally fictitious of course.
As with modern scams, there is no doubt that victims were found. There are numerous newspaper articles starting around 1876 which refer to the fraud and how victims had been taken in, and the occasional article detailing a successful police response.
It appears some things never change:
– Developers of new technologies rarely think about potential abuses
– Criminals are always early adopters
– People get caught out.
This post is outside of our normal range focused on the history of projects and allied disciplines but this subject does raise questions around the ethical responsibility of people developing new processes and technologies. For more on the evolution of ethics see: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-ZSY-015.php
Pat Weaver
Lynda Bourne
Aavssitedev's Blog