A Nigerian internet scammer has managed to scam himself out of over £5,000. Winston M’Bahh, a serial scammer, said that he was “extremely embarrassed” and was unsure of how he was ever going to be able to live this one down.

“I’m usually so careful”, said M’Bahh. “But it’s been such a good year, I’ve had scams going on all over the world. Unfortunately, it turns out that I was scamming myself for a large part of it, and I didn’t even realise.”

M’Bahh’s favourite scamming tactic is the ‘dead member of a royal family has left you a million pounds’ e-mail, although he admits that he has been getting a little bit lazy of late.

“You know, it’s all to easy to send out the dead royal family one. Some of my brothers are being much more inventive. They’re going to have a field day when they found out that I had fallen for my own scam!”

M’Bahh had e-mailed himself with information that he had been left $15,000,000.00 by a recently deceased Angolan general.

“I’m so good, I believed every word of it. So I started communicating with myself. Really, I send so many e-mails that I completely got lost in the thread of things. I must have exchanged about 30 or 40 e-mails with myself. I really should have twigged when I wrote ‘it’s really hot in here’ and ‘my Dog Flunkychops won’t eat his breakfast’. But I just skim over stuff usually.”

The crunch came when M’Bahh arranged a meeting with himself, and failed to turn up.

“It was at that point that I really should have worked it out. But I was left waiting at the airport with a card holding up my own name, and nobody turned up. I’m such a fool. I went home and wrote a very angry e-mail to myself accusing me of not taking the whole thing seriously, and reminded myself that my dying grandmother would seriously disapprove of me.”