Nigerian e-mail scammers feeding on greed, gullibility !!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: Globe and Mail
December 5, 2005 Author: STEPHANIE NOLEN



...... "Their favourite targets are Americans, who have the perfect combination of greed and gullibility. "The Americans always go for it," according to a senior member of one 419 ring, who gave his name as Sunny. "But Canadians never do it. It's difficult to hook a person from Canada."



Lagos — In a steamy Lagos Internet café, thumping with the bass beat of Nigerian rock videos on a TV overhead, barrister Olayinka Okwudili sits writing an urgent e-mail about his financial crisis.

If you believe the letter, he's a prominent Lagos barrister who needs to move some money. It is possible, however, that this young man in artfully distressed jeans and a T-shirt is not, in fact, a barrister, but he is distinctly unwilling to discuss the matter.

Similar young men, alone or in pairs, are at many of the computers around him in a middle-class residential neighbourhood of Africa's busiest city, some of whom can be overheard discussing the exact turn of phrase they need for their letters, which seek "dear friends" in "far off lands" to help them with the "very urgent matter of $10-million" tragically left in the account of their "very dear late father."

You know the letters, of course. If you have an e-mail account, you have received one from an apologetic correspondent (likely to be either the child of a recently deposed African leader or a recently dismissed middle manager in a government ministry) who acknowledges he or she does not know you personally but nevertheless seeks your assistance with a financial transaction.

For your help, they say, you will receive a multimillion-dollar thank-you present.

The letters are so frequent and so preposterous that you may find it difficult to believe that anyone replies, let alone forks over bank details or cash.

But they do: People involved in the scam -- known as 419 after the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code that prohibits it -- say that they get one or two genuine replies for every thousand letters they send. And of those handful of replies, every month or so, one yields a few thousand dollars, and one yields substantially more.

Their favourite targets are Americans, who have the perfect combination of greed and gullibility. "The Americans always go for it," according to a senior member of one 419 ring, who gave his name as Sunny. "But Canadians never do it. It's difficult to hook a person from Canada."

No one here seems to know exactly how much money changes hands in 419 fraud, very little of which is reported. But last month, two men were convicted of fraud after a gullible and corrupt bank employee in Brazil was convinced to send so much money -- $242-million to help win a fake airport contract -- that the bank from which he was embezzling actually collapsed.

The scams are such a part of popular culture here that they spawned a hit song, I go chop your dollar, sung by comedic superstar Osuofia, which includes the line "White people are greedy, yes I can say they are greedy . . .White men, I will eat your dollars, will take your money and disappear."

And although the e-mail scams are only a sliver of the staggering amount of fraud that goes on here, Nigeria's anti-corruption officials are keen to crack down on it. "It hurts us. The foreign investment is not coming in the way you would expect six years into democracy and that comes from how we are perceived abroad: as the haven of Internet fraud," said Osita Nwajah, spokesman for the national Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. "Most Nigerians are honest and hard-working but there is just a lot of attention focused on this."

Mr. Nwajah was so irritated by I go chop your dollar, which he says glorifies the scams, that he had it banned from Nigerian airwaves a few weeks ago.

A law now before Parliament will make spam punishable by a jail term of up to three years and fines of up to $10,000. The bill would also target Internet service providers who facilitate the spam scams or fail to co-operate with law enforcement, with further fines of up to $100,000. In response, Internet cafés all over this country now post signs reading "Scammers beware! 419 not allowed here," and similar warnings. The commission wants to target banks, obliging them to report suspicious deposits.

Chris Ola, who heads the national police fraud squad, marvels at the amount of scamming, but said young people here today often feel they have no choice. "Even if you have a business and you are straight, you can't succeed in this system," he said. "In Nigeria we don't have welfare programs or social security and because of the economic downturn we have a lot of well-equipped Nigerians who are supposed to be employed gainfully but there is nothing for them," he said. Nonetheless, he marvels. "Any cyber café you go to you just see people plotting their way out of Nigeria or plotting some big money to come to them."