Today, I received an email from Flora Abed, a twenty year old girl living with her younger brother alone for fear of being found by the people that killed her father. There is $9.5 million dollars in a trunk in Sierra Leone that she needs me to help get out of the country. What should I do?

Well, normally, I hit the delete button, which I did quickly on this email. However, I stopped at thought. Perhaps the person who wrote this email can help me after all. I'm writing a novel for NaNoWriMo and have thought about adding a Nigerian scammer or two into the novel, so I sent this reply:

Hi. Thanks for the email.

I'm in the process of writing a novel about Nigerian, or 419 scams. In particularly, the heroes of the story create a fictious person. A Nigerian scammer attempts to scam the fictious person. One of the heroes decides to play along and try to outscam the scammer. Essentially, he provides banking information so that the first scammer can make sure they can transfer the funds necessary. When they raid the account, they find there is no money there to raid. However, the hero gets the scammers banking information. When the next scammer comes along, the hero gives the second scammer the bank information of the first, pitting the two scammers against one another.

I'm interested in your thoughts about this scenario. Does it seem believable? Feasible? How do you think the scammers would react? What other fallout do you think would happen? As an aside, one of the characters in the novel is an FBI agent working with IC3. How would you imagine the FBI agent getting involved with this would react and how it would play out?

Any thoughts you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

What do you think? Will I get an interesting reply? Do you have thoughts on the plot twist? Any feedback is appreciated.