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How To Fight Nigerian Scams as an Honest Nigerian?

Posted by Cliff on from the code-419 dept.

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?"

3 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Thank US banking regulations by white1827 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. A warning! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:How Nigerians and Get their Good Name Back by dasunt · · Score: 4, Informative
    The police can often have little knowledge of white collar crime. In the western world, white collar crime has been known and perfected over a 500 years (credit and interest were long adopted in Christiandom, which facilitated these crimes, but not so much in Muslim countries where interest is often illegal)

    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.)