The Board Seat Scam: A 419 Letter in a Business Suit

I’ve gotten hundreds of these over the years. They all say about the same thing.

Somebody’s “analysis team” has reviewed my background. It looks like a strong match for some compensated board and advisory roles they’re working to fill. They’d love to discuss it further. Can I find fifteen minutes for a call?

Most of the ones I get are longer than that, padded out with talk about governance and the value of experienced leaders, but the bones never change. It’s a 419 scam with a nicer haircut. The Nigerian prince wanted help moving his millions. This guy wants to put you on a board. Either way, the money only moves in one direction, and it’s out of your pocket.

A man posted one of these on social media recently and asked what people thought. It was nearly word for word what lands in my inbox, and every line of it was doing a job.

What is a board seat scam?

It’s an advance-fee con aimed at executives and professionals. They dangle a paid seat on a corporate or advisory board. Before you get anywhere near it, you pay.

The 419 name comes from Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, the section that covers advance-fee fraud. The old letters promised a cut of a fortune if you’d just pay the transfer fees, the taxes or the bribe to release it. The board seat version swaps the fortune for a director’s fee and a title, and swaps the transfer fee for a “board readiness” program, a membership, a profile listing or a placement fee.

Then the money goes the wrong way.

You pay. You maybe get a binder, a webinar and a spot in a database. The seat you were promised never shows up.

Some senders are outright crooks. Others are matchmaking services that sell memberships and call them opportunities. I don’t care which kind it is. If the first real step is you writing a check to be considered for a job that’s supposed to pay you, it’s the same con, and the polite version is still taking your money for a seat it can’t deliver.

A crook at least has the decency to disappear. The membership outfit keeps billing you every year while you wait for a phone call that never comes, and the fix it offers is a pricier tier.

What gives away a fake board seat email?

Read one carefully and it falls apart. Every line is built to sound specific while saying nothing at all.

Start with “our analysis team wanted me to reach out.” There’s no analyst named. There’s no team you could look up. It’s a faceless authority invented so you’ll believe somebody important studied you. What happened is that your name landed on a list of people with senior titles, and a program sent the same paragraph to everyone on it.

Then “some of the compensated board and advisory roles.” Which roles? What company? What industry? What does it pay? A real recruiter leads with the seat, because the seat is the whole pitch. These emails never name one, because there isn’t one.

“Compensated” sits right up front for a reason. It’s the hook. A lot of executives would love a paid board seat, and the word is aimed straight at that wish.

Notice there’s no number attached to it. That one word is doing most of the work.

The formatting gives it away too. The copy that got posted had line breaks in the middle of phrases, the kind you get when text written for one fixed width gets blasted into thousands of inboxes. Nobody typed that message to him. A mail merge did.

And the only concrete thing in the whole email is the ask: get on a call. Everything else is fog, and the fog is deliberate. A vague email can’t be fact-checked, and a phone call leaves no paper trail for you to show anybody later.

Why do board seat scams work on executives?

They go after what successful people have the hardest time turning down: somebody telling them they matter.

Look at who gets these emails. People with VP, director and C-level titles, people who’ve run departments and companies for twenty or thirty years. A lot of them are looking at what comes next. Retirement is close, or the corner office got taken by somebody younger, or they’re consultants now and the phone isn’t ringing like it used to. A board seat sounds like the perfect next chapter: respect, a little money, a seat at the table without the eighty-hour weeks. The scammers know exactly how that feels, and they write straight to it.

That makes them contemptible. They aren’t conning a greedy mark who wanted to steal a dead prince’s fortune. They’re going after people’s pride and their fear of being put out to pasture, and charging them for the privilege.

The longer versions lean on it even harder. Mine usually run several paragraphs, full of talk about how boards desperately need experienced leaders, how few qualified candidates there are, and how your background is exactly the kind that’s in demand. It’s flattery dressed up as market research. None of it names a company.

What happens if you answer one of these emails?

If you take the call, it’s a sales call.

First they flatter you. Your experience is impressive, you’re exactly what boards are looking for, and they’ve placed people just like you. Then the problem shows up: boards want candidates who are “board ready,” and the people who get seats are the ones in the right network. Conveniently, they sell both. There’s a program, a membership, a profile they’ll build and put in front of boards, and it all comes with a price tag.

Even if you hang up, answering the email did something. It told them your address is live and you’re interested in board work. That’s worth money to the people who send these. Lists of responsive senior executives get used again and resold, and the pitches change. Next it’s a speaking slot you pay for, an award you pay to accept, or a feature in a magazine nobody reads that costs a few thousand dollars to appear in.

How do real board seats get filled?

Mostly through people who already know you. Cold email has almost nothing to do with it.

Researchers at Drexel and the University of Waterloo looked at 9,923 board appointments from 2003 to 2014. More than 75 percent of the new directors came from the existing board’s first- or second-degree network, people the directors knew or people their friends knew. At S&P 500 companies the number was 94 percent.

When a board does hire outside help, it’s a retained executive search firm, and it isn’t shy about who it is. The first message names the firm, the company or at least its industry and size, the seat, and why they’re calling you in particular. They’re paid by the board. They don’t charge you a dime to be considered.

Most first board seats aren’t on a public company board at all. People start on nonprofit boards, industry association boards and advisory boards for small companies and startups, where the pay is modest or comes as equity and the work is real. Those seats come the same way the big ones do, through somebody who knows your work and asks you. Nobody needs a matching service to tell a local nonprofit you’d be good on its board. You need to show up, help, and let people see what you can do.

So the arithmetic is simple. If a board seat is going to come your way, it’ll most likely come through a relationship. Somebody you’ve worked with, somebody who’s read your work or heard you speak, somebody who trusts you. It won’t come from a stranger’s “analysis team” in a mass email.

How to check a board offer before you waste an hour

Ask two questions in writing before you agree to any call. What company is the seat with, and what is the role? A legitimate recruiter will answer both, or tell you the company is confidential for now and give you its industry, its size and the search firm’s name. A scammer will steer you back to the call.

Look up whoever sent it. A real search firm has a history, named partners and placements you can verify. A board matching service that mostly sells memberships will have complaints, and they’re easy to find.

Watch how they answer. A scammer gets vague the moment you ask for something checkable. If they won’t put the company’s name in writing, you have your answer, and you didn’t have to give them a minute of your time to get it.

Then apply the one rule that settles it. Any fee to be considered for a paid seat means walk away.

Directors get paid. Candidates don’t pay. Remember that and you’re safe.

And don’t feel bad about deleting these. You don’t owe a reply to somebody who blasted the same paragraph to ten thousand people and couldn’t be bothered to name a single company.

The seat that was never there

The prince never had a fortune, and these people never had a seat. What they have is a list of executives who’d like one, and a paragraph that tells each of them what they want to hear.

If you want a board to notice you, do the slow thing. Build real relationships with people who’d vouch for you, and make your name easy to find for the right reasons. A book helps with that, and my executive book process explains how that works. There’s more on the cons aimed at professionals in my piece on author scam emails and the story of the $35K ghostwriting scam that almost fooled me, and more on leadership in the Leadership Hub.

As for the email, it’ll be back next week, with a different name on the signature and the same empty chair.

From the author

Networking Without the BS
Real opportunities come through people who know you. This is my book on building those relationships, written by an introvert who used to avoid networking entirely.

Frequently Asked Questions