Court Order Granted on Nigeria Scam

The son of a prominent Orange County psychiatrist on Thursday successfully stopped his father from spending any more of the family fortune on what a lawsuit says was a Nigerian Internet scam that duped him out of as much as $3 million.

Guy Gottschalk won a court order preventing his father, Louis A. Gottschalk, the founding chairman of the department of psychiatry at UC Irvine, from wiring more money to Nigeria.

According to the son's lawsuit, his father gave the money over a 10-year period in response to an Internet plea that promised the doctor a generous cut of a huge sum of cash trapped in African bank accounts in exchange for money advances.

Orange County Superior Court Judge David T. McEachen's order stops Gottschalk, 89, who still works at the UCI campus medical plaza that bears his name, from frittering away funds from an $8-million family partnership.

The elder Gottschalk, a neuroscientist, gained national prominence in 1987 by announcing that President Reagan had been suffering from diminished mental ability as early as 1980.

Fred W. Anderson, an attorney representing the son, declined to comment.

According to Guy Gottschalk's account in court papers, his father first responded to the solicitations from Nigeria in 1995.

A year later, Louis Gottschalk traveled to Africa to meet "the General" and other Nigerians "to show them that he was sincere so he would get the money."

But later, his son said, Gottschalk admitted to him that he had lost $300,000 and that FBI agents concluded that he had been a victim of an Internet scam.

The scam, known in some circles as a "419" after the Nigerian statute that outlaws fraud, preys on people with e-mail accounts. Though there are many variations, it begins with an unsolicited message from Nigeria or another African nation, usually from a supposedly high-ranking official, banker or businessman, who needs to get millions of dollars out of his country.

If the target of the sting agrees to set up a U.S. bank account and pay transfer fees and other charges, he's told that he'll get a substantial portion of the money once it is freed up.