Oh yea, the old 419 scam. People due fall for it. I know of an owner of a title & escrow company that fell for it. The escrow trust fund account & the operating account were both cleaned out. The woman lost everything- her company, residence and anything that could be sold to compensate the bonding company. Since she had a fiduiary responsility regarding the trust fund anything she owned could be attached. She barely avoided federal prison. I think because she was about 60 yrs old & had nothing left to sell she wasn' t sent to jail.
I read a book about the boiler rooms in Nigeria that crank out these emails. Thousands are sent out weekly so if there's only a slight return of replies, it's enough suckers to keep teams of these scammers fed. Usually when a reply is received, it's handed off to a more sophisticated scammer up the food chain. Organized crime ran out of internet coffee shops.
At a company I worked for when fax machines were cutting edge, these type of bogus faxes would print out saying that they wanted to wire money to your trust account & you get to keep 25% so they needed your wire info. Some folks bit.