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  • 2019-10-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Is a Nigerian Astronaut Lost in Space? (en)
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  • The words Nigerian prince raise red flags for many readers because they've become synonymous with a genre of scam known as a 4-1-9 or advance fee fraud scheme. Yet many people are still sucked in by these letters and emails promising wealth in exchange for sending aid to a non-existent member of Nigerian royalty. In October 2019, we came across a decidedly bizarre version of the scam. This time, Nigerian astronaut Abacha Tunde was reportedly stuck in space and his cousin, Dr. Bakare Tunde, was asking you, the reader, for $3 million to get him home. If you come across this email, do not send Tunde $3 million. This is a scam. The scam letter does contain a few bits of factual information. For instance, Salyut 6 is a real space station that was launched in 1977, and the Soyuz-T was a real spacecraft that made multiple trips to the Mir and Salyut space stations. However, we found no record of a Soyuz T-16Z mission (the Soyuz-T's final mission was the Soyuz T-15 in 1986). Nor have we come across any reports from NASA, the Chinese National Space Agency, the European Space Agency, the Soviet Space Program, or the Nigerian Space Agency regarding a lost astronaut. Furthermore, verbatim copies of this letter have been circulating since 2004, yet Tunde continues to claim that it's been 14 years since this astronaut got stranded in 1990. If this email truly relayed a factual event, the Nigerian astronaut would be spending his 29th year stranded in space in 2019. The Nigerian scheme dates back to at least the 1920s. You can read more about how these scams work (and how to avoid them) here. Below is a newspaper article about a pen pal racket that was broken up by police in 1949: Fri, Sep 30, 1949 – 6 · The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Alabama) · Newspapers.com (en)
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