Slashdot Mirror
How To Fight Nigerian Scams as an Honest Nigerian?
A Nigerian asks: "As honest Nigerians, it is painful to us that everyone assumes that we are all scammers. We can't use e-payment services like Paypal, 2Checkout.com or make payments online without having the transactions flagged as scams, denied, or our account and funds arbitrarily locked for months or years. We want to make the scams from our country stop so we can be trusted again. We don't want to be left out of the Internet revolution taking place all over the world. What can we as ordinary and honest Nigerian citizens do to fight Nigerian E-mail Scams?"
Basically, US regulations regarding Anti Money Laundering (AML) and the Office of Foriegn Asset Control require you to manually scrutinize each and every transaction that goes in and out of certain geographic regions (including all of Nigeria). I can see where PayPal and others would want to avoid the expense of having a human being look at all the transactions and just disallow them en masse.
Popular attitudes towards financial crimes, and criminals, must change in Nigeria. See Nkem Owoh's hit video "I Go Chop Your Dollar" for an example of this problem.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I think I should add that before you try any baiting yourself you should read the stickies on the forum since they contain very important information how to bait safe and what to do and what not to.
Technically, in Christiandom, interest (usury) was considered a sin for quite a long time. Jewish law, OTOH, permitted charging interest on a loan to non-Jews. Thus moneylenders were often Jewish. This is one of the reasons for anti-Semitism during the Middle Ages. The debtors were Christians, the lenders were Jewish. (In addition, due to anti-Semitism, Jews often had unpopular jobs such as tax collectors.)
Its a sad fact that Nigeria constantly rates as the most corrupt country, but that is a reflection of the bad mix of oil money, greedy politicians, racial/religious divisions, and a culture of corruption as the normal way of life.
Its unlikely you, or even a large group of activists will be able to change much within Nigeria. A revolution would only install a different corrupt regime, still backed by the petroleum companies, possibly with northern Nigeria cut off as a separate, and much poorer and dangerous, state. It would be far better to work at cleaning up the system from within, by creating a large movement to reform the judiciary and police, maybe by getting the petroleum interests to push the change. Only when your judicial system produces some positive results will the rest of the world start to work with Nigeria.
Nigierians have the worst reputation among all the western African peoples, as you are probably painfully aware. I've been working with a number of groups helping to develop western Africa (from DRC to Senegal). Everyone involved insists that Nigeria is excluded so the programs aren't immediately drained by corruption. The quote I hear from some Nigerian trade reps is that Nigerians would sell drugs in front of their children's school if they thought they could make any money off it, with no consideration for ethics or the welfare of their own offspring. As a Nigerian, you have a huge image problem to overcome, there are no quick or simple ways to establish a better reputation.
You could do what most Nigerian businesses do, open an office in Benin or Cameroon for all of your international transactions. There are many companies in Nigeria that offer this service, i.e. provide small companies in Nigeria with a phone number from another country, and postal redirection. But these too are abused by scammers, it is now the most lucrative way to bilk western companies.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on