In this week’sNew Yorker, the writer Patrick Radden Keefe investigatesthe mysterious death of Zac Brettler, a London teen who plummeted into the Thames after getting entangled in the city’s criminal underworld. In the years that followed, Brettler’s parents discovered that their son may have operated under a false identity, portraying himself as the scion of a Russian oligarch. Such a ruse, Keefe notes, would resemble the infamous “Nigerian-prince scam,” in which a con artist claims tremendous family wealth that is temporarily out of reach. In 2006, the magazine publisheda report on just such a scam—except that the fictional Nigerian, in this case, was a dictator’s son rather than a prince. The mark was a Massachusetts man named John Worley, an ordained minister who also worked as a psychotherapist. Despite Worley’s religious and professional training, he quickly fell for the scheme, which began when he received an e-mail asking for a loan to cover some initial costs, with the promise that he would be repaid with many millions as a reward. Lo and behold, the first loan request was followed by more, and then by more after that. Soon Worley, a grandfather and Vietnam veteran, grew suspicious of his new e-mail contact—but, already in deep, he resorted to borrowing funds from one of his therapy patients and passing fake checks to hold up his end of the bargain. The Secret Service, the foremost agency investigating such cons, estimated that targets of similar rackets were cheated annually out of hundreds of millions of dollars—a number, the article notes, that doesn’t account for “losses by victims too embarrassed to complain.” | 
