It’s one of the more preposterous e-mail scams you’re likely to encounter, a get-rich-quick scheme so transparently bogus that no one could be foolish enough to fall for it.

At least that’s what I thought when I read the letter from Africa that showed up in my e-mail box at work earlier this week. But I was wrong, as it turns out. There are plenty of people foolish enough to fall for this scam, which has been fleecing naive Americans out of an estimated $1 million a day for a few years now.

Not you, of course, dear reader. You’re too smart to be taken in by something so obviously fraudulent. So for the benefit of the most gullible Mainers among us, who just might get one of these e-mails one day and be lured helplessly into its trap, here’s what to look for.

The African e-mails can take a variety of forms. Yours might be from an African businessman, who says he needs your extraordinary business savvy to help him get a pile of money out of his country. It might come from an oil company representative with a similar request, or an African prince, or even the president of Nigeria himself.

My e-mail – yours, too, perhaps? – was from a guy named Nzanga Seko Mobutu, who identifies himself as “the first son of the late Mobutu Sese Seko, the former president of the Congo Republic.” This unfortunate fellow, it seems, is a political refugee in Nigeria who was left $50 million from his father’s estate. At the height of the political turmoil in his country a few years back, Mobutu told me, he boxed up the money and shipped it to a security company somewhere for safekeeping. Now that the crisis has ended, he wants me, a “trustworthy person,” to join him in a nifty plan that would get the money out of hiding and make me rich in the process. My African benefactor would handle all the tricky parts of the deal. All I had to do was provide him with my Social Security number or driver’s license number, my address, telephone number, and a signed letter of commitment – a few minor details, if you will, that would set this “very safe” though “strictly confidential” transaction into motion.

“Ah, yes, I believe you’ve stumbled onto the Nigerian scam,” said Assistant Attorney General James McKenna when I called him about the curious e-mail. “It’s been around for a few years now. Apparently enough people fall for it or the thing would have died long ago.”

McKenna, who works in the Public Protection Division, said he gets lots of inquiries about the Nigerian scam. So many, in fact, that an entire section of the Attorney General’s Web site is devoted to this one successful fraud and its intriguing methods of parting fools from their money.

“The characters may be different but the premise is always the same,” he told me. “Someone is looking to park a lot money in a bank account someplace. Eventually, you get sucked into giving your checking account number, and your account winds up being completely drained.”

McKenna said the Nigerian scam is so widespread, in fact, that the U.S. Department of Justice got a court order to open every piece of Nigerian mail that arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The investigation revealed that nearly 70 percent of the Nigerian mail took the form of scam offers. The postal letters, he said, are now being sent as e-mails.

McKenna is not sure how many Mainers have fallen for the Nigerian scam. As with most frauds – including the so-called “gifting club” schemes that McKenna’s office has been investigating for months – victims are often reluctant to complain to authorities, either from embarrassment at being duped or out of fear that they’ve done something illegal.

“But we have gotten a few complaints from victims,” McKenna said. “I’m never surprised when people tell me how tempted they are. It lures you in stages. You might reply simply out of curiosity, and since you’re in the hands of a first-class schemer, there’s a good chance of being sucked in further. One time a man told me he’d heard from someone who claimed to have discovered a magic wishing well somewhere. When he finished telling me about the scam, there was a long pause and then the man asked, ‘There’s no truth to it, is there?’ So I guess you never know what people will fall for.”

About 10 minutes after our interview had ended, McKenna called back with a scam update. He said he had just read a news story out of England that reported the arrest of six people in South Africa for their involvement in the “infamous Nigerian e-mail and letter fraud.” Authorities said they hoped the arrests marked “an important breakthrough in the battle against the international scam” that has defrauded people of hundreds of millions of dollars so far.

“Well, they got six of them,” McKenna said with a laugh. “Now maybe we can all sleep better tonight.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.