Harvard Prof. Scams Friends, Students To Pay Nigerian Scammers
from the scam-within-a-scam dept
Amazing. You always wonder what sort of people are taken in by Nigerian 419 scams. They seem like such obvious scams, and there's been so much press coverage about them that you wonder who could possibly still fall for them. Apparently, the answer is a former Harvard professor and AIDS/cancer researcher. After falling for one such Nigerian scam, he proceeded to scam friends, colleagues and even students out of $600,000. He claimed he was setting up a SARS research center in China (this was at the height of the SARS scare), when he was really funneling that money to Nigerian scammers so he could get his share of a non-existent $50 million prize. Apparently, like some other 419 victims, this scientists still refuses to admit that his Nigerian contacts were scamming him.
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More likely he stashed the money and claimed to have sent it to Nigeria so he wouldn't have to cough it up.
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Obligatory One-up comment
Harvard has peerless programs in AIDS, cancer, and clinical trials research. They're not too good at the newer types of research that involve interdisciplinary collaboration between biology, math, and computer science. Faculty egos are too big, and they have secure funds from prestigious grant programs, therefore little incentive to change.
I got a scholarship from one of the better public universities for such a program, though. ;-) I'm moving there shortly, to start working for a prof.
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