Techworld.com has a good article about the NASA employee who was one of many scammed by a 22 year old Nigerian citizen. His name is Akeem Adejumo and he pleaded guilty on 2 charges for obtaining goods by false pretences and forgery. He was sentenced to 18 months in a Nigeria prison in April.
Akeem initially contacted the NASA employee in late 2006 on the dating site Singlesnet.com. He posed as a resident from Texas, complete with a fake picture and background information. He did not target her directly for being an employee of NASA as he was also in contact with several other woman using the same bogus profile. The two communicated for several weeks through email before he sent her a picture at work. The picture turned out to be spyware that when viewed infected her system. The spyware harvested emails, passwords, personal information and took over 20,000 pictures of what was displayed on her screen. It tool NASAs IT department over 15 days to figure out it had happened and to lock down her computer. After reviewing network traffic logs, it was determined no critical NASA information was stolen.
This is one of the first times that US investigators and prosecutors worked close together with Nigerian authorities involving internet scams. Nigeria has been a hotspot of late for all types of internet scams.
What can the average internet user and online dater learn from this story? There are three main things. The first one is that scam artists don't just want your money directly, they want your identity as well. With your identity they can sign up for new credit cards or even take out a loan. So, keep that personal information (like your SIN and Bank account numbers) secure and if possible do not keep it on a computer that accesses the internet. Never store this type of information on someone else's computer, including your work computer. Most people don't own their work computers, the company does. Anyone from your company's IT department could probably access this work computer and your private information on it. Plus, information of your work computer can be vulnerable if other computers on the same network get infected with spyware.
The second thing to take from this story is, always have a good anti-virus and spyware software installed. These programs catch 99.9% of the spyware out there, whether you download it through a website or receive it via email. If you don't have one, Google Norton, McAfee or ESET. These companies all have good anti-virus software.
The last main thing to learn from this is, never open an email attachment from a source you don't trust. Even if you do trust them you need to be wary because there are viruses and spyware out there that when they infect a computer, they use that persons email accounts and contacts to send out copies of itself. With online dating it is always better to tell the person to post the picture on the dating site you are using. If you are more computer savvy you can check the file extension of the email attachment. If it is an image file extension like .gif or .jpg it should be ok. If it is a .com or .exe extension, never open it as those are actual computer programs. It could be a program that simply displays a picture (and therefore harmless) or it could be one that infects your computer.
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