Please, people. This article is a spoof, a scam-within-a-scam. I can't believe people actually swallow this story. Someone's having a good laugh right now.
"All right, if I win a game of hearts with less than 15 points, I’ll do it" -- please!
I used to love baiting the 419ers; I would redirect their inquiries to a throwaway hotmail account where I would draw them out with silly questions and comments. Usually it would not last much beyond 3-4 emails, though; they seem pretty good at sniffing out a baiter.
419eater.com is excellent, and there are or were a couple of other good collections out there, some really funny exchanges. In one, this (supposedly) dumb American flew to some town in Thailand instead of Nigeria, and the Nigerian got so mad he cursed and told him to go to hell. So much for that scam!
Sadly, I took down my scam baiting correspondence after I applied to a job with a Scottsdale networking company and their "security guy" did a google search that netted these exchanges. "You need to list these as relationships with foreign entities," he scolded. "Huh? It's just a joke, they might be in Florida for all I know." Nope. No sense of humor. They withdrew the job offer which was just as well; a very large bullet did I dodge that time!
More recently Nigerians, or similar folk, have been posting fake ads on Craigslist. A couple of years ago when we were looking for an apartment, I came across an unbelievably good deal, a huge luxury condo in Newton, Mass., for like $700 a month. It sounded just too good to be true; I contacted them and asked if it was a typo. They said in slightly less good English than in the ad that, no, it's not a typo, and they're going on some sort of mission to Africa for two years (uh oh, here it comes!) and needed a good reliable person to rent their home. Sniffing a scam, I decided to test them by mentioning that we had a pet howler monkey, but not to worry, he's very quiet and well behaved (howler monkeys are in fact considered the loudest land animals) and they didn't bat an eye, so I continued embellishing: he does sometimes fly into fits of rage and throw things, but for the most part he's pretty well house trained. When can we move in? But they stopped writing back.
People do get suckered, but usually it's because they are quite gullible, or lonely, or desperate, or some combination thereof. The character in the vice.com story had all of those qualities in abundance, making the story that much more believable, and he threw in quite a few details that seem factual enough, but overall things just didn't add up.