25 September 2017
In 2016, an old scam began circulating on Facebook about a man who needed to collect money to rescue his cousin, a Nigerian astronaut, from space. One Dr. Bakare Tunde explained that he needed to raise $3 million to save the astronaut from a secret Soviet-era space station where he was trapped. The email seemed preposterous-the astronaut would have been stuck on the space station for some 25 years-but the subject of the scam wasn't entirely far fetched. Nigeria does operate a space program that is managed by the National Space Research and Development Agency, which the scammer accurately described. And in 2016 Nigeria announced it really would be sending a manned mission to the moon.
