"Is there a person left on the planet who would fall for a 419 scam nowadays?"

There are probably many who would, Eliza. After all, the human ego has the habit of thinking of itself as "the center of the world". As such, it expects that maybe one day it will get its "lucky break" and its ship will come in. This usually means getting a lot of money! ;-) This makes people vulnerable to things which seem to offer them that dream.

I saw my father go though it, despite the fact that he was a pretty cunning and cautious businessman...but what made him vulnerable was the kind of thinking I spoke of above. He was waiting all his life for that one big break that would make him very wealthy (as well as working like a dog to get it).

He, like anyone else, was receiving these 419 scams in his email in about the last 10 years of his life when he began using computers regularly. He just couldn't resist the lure of the "big break", so he followed up on one of them and contacted the people who sent it.

They wanted him to provide bank account numbers and stuff. He was too smart to do that, but he kept in touch with them, and they finally arranged to set up a meeting for him in New York City when he was on a trip there on some other business. He met with their "representative" at some place in Manhattan and had a half hour of fruitless discussion which led nowhere useful, at which point he decided that they weren't "real", and he gave up on the whole thing.

So he didn't lose any money to them, but he did lose quite a bit of his time and attention to a wild goose chase.

They kept in touch with him for months afterward, and he kept putting them off. The emails got funnier and funnier. They began questioning his sanity for being so foolish as to pass up such a great opportunity. In their last email, they began with the sentence, "Dear Mr ---------, are you COMPLETELY MAD????"

I was laughing and laughing about it. I used to help him with his computer stuff (he had a terrible time using the computer), and I saw most of those emails. I had advised him from the beginning that it was a scam, but he decided to pursue it anyway. He just could NOT resist the thought of getting all that money! And who better in the world to deserve it than him?