419 scam (also referred to as Nigerian scam) is a popular form of fraud in which the fraudster tricks the victim into\npaying a certain amount of money under the promise of a future, larger payoff.\nUsing a public dataset, in this paper, we study how these forms of scam campaigns are organized and evolve over time.\nIn particular, we discuss the role of phone numbers as important identifiers to group messages together and depict\nthe way scammers operate their campaigns. In fact, since the victim has to be able to contact the criminal, both email\naddresses and phone numbers need to be authentic and they are often unchanged and re-used for a long period of\ntime. We also present in detail several examples of 419 scam campaigns, some of which last for several years -\nrepresenting them in a graphical way and discussing their characteristics.
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