Urgent message from somebody in Nigeria!

In one way, it seems amazing that those spam scams are still circulating; you'd think that by now even internet tyros would have heard about them at least enough to know to avoid them. But in another way, it's not surprising - because if you do manage to scam someone, it's very unlikely you'll be caught or prosecuted. Why? I can't tell you: It's a matter of national security.

But the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did tell us on Wednesday (with thanks to TPM for the tip).

Thousands of white-collar criminals across the country are no longer being prosecuted in federal court - and, in many cases, not at all - leaving a trail of frustrated victims and potentially billions of dollars in fraud and theft losses.

It is the untold story of the Bush administration's massive restructuring of the FBI after the terrorism attacks of 9/11.

Five-and-a-half years later, the White House and the Justice Department have failed to replace at least 2,400 agents transferred to counterterrorism squads, leaving far fewer agents on the trail of identity thieves, con artists, hatemongers and other criminals.

The facts the P-I found are damning. In the period 2000-2005,

- the number of criminal cases sent to prosecutors by the FBI dropped from 31,000 to 20,000, a 34% drop.
- the number of white-collar crimes referred for prosecution plummeted from over 10,000 to 3500 - a cut of more than 2/3.
- civil rights cases, including hate crimes and police abuse, dropped 65%.

"There's a niche of fraudsters that are floating around unprosecuted," said one recently retired top FBI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are not going to jail. There is no law enforcement solution in sight."

In fact, fraud cases where the losses are less than $150,000 aren't even on the radar and even ones involving losses of $500,000 are unlikely to get any attention.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the next time Shrub talked about how his job is to make the rest of us "safe," someone brought up these numbers and asked how uninvestigated crime, unprosecuted civil rights violations, and a laissez-faire attitude toward fraud are making us safer?