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?"

Comments

How Nigerians and Get their Good Name Back

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Your government needs to start policing the criminals that give your country a bad name. If they were to hook up with the people at http://www.419eater.com/ I'm sure they could come up with a way for the 419eater guys to trick the scammer into turning themselves in to the police there.

Regardless of the specifics, either the country must start policing itself, or you have to pull a Chalabi and convince Bush to come liberate you from the scammers instead. You probably don't want that. Though I hear that you do have a lot of oil there, being the largest oil producer in all of Africa.

Re:How Nigerians and Get their Good Name Back

[globalar]

Africa policing is in bad shape (excepting SA). There is poor crime data, little or no accountability, and effectiveness can hardly be measured (though possibly observed). You can imagine how these factors would adversely affect decent people and allow further illegal behavior.

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). The problem is largely that electionic communcation and transfers mean that there is a lot of overhead to catch criminals, especially if the victims are overseas. Transactions have to be looked into and this can take a long time in a relatively efficient, resource-plentiful, Western investigations. In Nigeria, this kind of process might be impossible in most small cases (e.g. most 419 scammers). And of course, trying the criminals is expensive and time-intensive. Extradition just as expensive. An investigation and trial is also people-intensive, involving legal professionals (who are non to plentiful in Nigeria).

Nigerian scammers (not the email variety) don't just bum around on email, they also operate throughout the nigerian government (See Transparency Intl's Survey). Scamming is the sibling of corruption. The beaurocracy is complex, incomprehensible as a whole, and plagued with illicit dealings. Really, scamming is encouraged by the system, because no one can penetrate it and find the muck. And finding muck isn't too rewarding, because it doesn't make you any friends, puts you at risk, and its so common no one really finds the information all too useful.

So who cares about information leading to some lady getting scammed in Florida? Helping foreign citizens, who have more money than brains, is really not a national priority.

www.419eater.com - is the place for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're Nigerian and have enough time on your hands you can both fight scammers and have fun if you join the so called "scambaiters" at www.419eater.com. In case you don't know what "scambaiting" is, I'll explain it briefly: The idea is to respond to the scam mails and pretend that you've fallen for it but then invent lots of time-consuming things for the scammers to do - such as going to an airport far away from where they are to meet you, provide lots of documentation about the money, fill out forms so that you can "trust them", tell them that you've sent the money and they should go to Western Union to pick it up and so on (the greedy scammers fall for almost anything so I sometimes wonder how such stupid people manage to scam anybody). That way the baiters waste the time of scammers that thus get less time for real victims and the profit ratio for them goes down too (money received from scams / time spent in an Internet cafe and doing whatever the baiters ask for). Many scambaiters publish the results of such scammer timewasters (or "baits" as they call them) and they are incredibly funny - check out the trophy room (they call the ridiculous pictures that they get scammers to take "trophies") on the site or listen to some recorded phone calls in the media forum (a scammer that realizes that he's been had and yells death threats in the telephone and hears laughter in return is incredibly funny - I especially recommend the calls in this bait).

The baiters appreciate Nigerians that join the fight very much since they have local knowledge and can thus pull off even better baits (they can really convince the scammers that they have gotten their victim to travel to Nigeria). One Nigerian baiter (Double-O) is absolutely incredible since he sometimes calls some of the scammers and pretendeds to be a fellow scammer and speaks Igbo and can thus convince them of almost anything (he got some scammers to drive eight hours to Ghana and back to meet a "victim"). So if you have the time you can become a very good baiter and thus fight back, have fun and get many fans at 419eater!