Alleged ‘Nigerian Prince’ email scammer arrested in Louisiana, NOT Nigerian
Chances are good your email address has gotten the odd email from a Nigerian prince offering you stacks of cash for some reason or another. One of two of them might even have been from a man who has been just been arrested in Slidell, Louisiana.
The Slidell police posted a Facebook message showing that the man in question is about as far from a Nigerian prince as one can get.
Michael Neu, a 67-year-old white man is facing a whopping 269 counts of wire fraud and money laundering after an 18-month investigation. He has allegedly taken part in hundreds of financial transactions that involved both phone and online scams that conned money out of people all across the US.
The “prince” asked for the target’s personal banking information so that he could speed up the transfer of his “inheritance” or so that he could use the person’s bank account to temporarily hold the funds for him. He would then use the info they gave him to steal the person’s money right out of the bank account.
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While Neu is no Nigerian prince, he did share some of the money with co-conspirators in Nigeria, according to police. Authorities are still working to untangle the various scams the suspect was involved in but many leads they are following connect to others who are not in the US.
Police have said that while many people do nothing more than laugh at these scams, there are plenty of trusting people who fall for them with authorities reporting millions of dollars in losses to these scams every year.
“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” said Police Chief Randy Fandal on Facebook. “Never give out personal information over the phone, through e-mail, cash checks for other individuals, or wire large amounts of money to someone you don’t know. 99.9 percent of the time, it’s a scam.”
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