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

well...

[flamesrock]

you can start by sending the money.

It's been 6 months...

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.

Re:How Nigerians and Get their Good Name Back

[bcrowell]

Your government needs to start policing the criminals that give your country a bad name.
Their government is the criminals that give the country a bad name.

The answer to the OP's question is that they need to overthrow their government.

Re:How Nigerians and Get their Good Name Back

[dasunt]

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.)

Curious.

[hey!]

The first thing I thought of when I read this was this quote from Othello:

He that steals my purse steals trash; its something, nothing,
But he that filches from my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And make me poor indeed.

Googling enough of the quote to get it right, the first hit in Google was the web site of Atiku Abubakar, the Vice President of Nigeria.

I'm not sure what it's doing there. Hopefully, it is a sign that he realizes the magnitude of the damage these scammers have done to the future of your country. It won't be easy getting your reputation back.

I'd say having democracy, even if it is a bit shaky, is a good first step. But you need more. You need a non-corrupt police force, an independent and impartial judiciary, and far-sighted laws aimed at the good of the nation instead of aggrandizing the the leadership. You scrupulous effort by people of good will in the private sector as well.

When you have largely eradicated the scammers, and when you have brought your political and legal system up to world class standards, I'd say you're still looking at fifteen years of Nigerians being automatically suspect.

Re:Curious.

[bergeron76]

Well lets see:

a) 4 Nigerian officals were killed in a helicopter crash a couple of weeks ago.
b) They were also purportedly selling "Yellow Cake" enriched Uranium to Iraq (which has clearly been proven false).
c) Profit!

As an American, I'd ordinarily recommend moving here and becoming a citizen. Because you could then gain international trust, be part of a democracy, and profit! However, these days I'm not sure that's a great idea. The entire world hates US (probably moreso than Nigeria!) because our so-called leader is an absolute dolt.

*sigh*

Re:Curious.

[Burz]

I think having a government that wasn't bought out by international oil companies would make officials more accountable to the needs of the population.

Re:Curious.

[F_Scentura]

Niger please.

Thank US banking regulations

[white1827]

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.

The real problem is...

[PostFutura]

The real problem is:

How to get trust as a *real* rich Nigerian who want's to transfer his money out of the country?

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!

Popular Attitudes

[Detritus]

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.

A warning!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Aasop's Fable

[dslauson]

You want to be accepted, then stop accepting scum. Simple."

That's an absolutely rediculous response. If we are all to be judged by the actions of the worst of our fellow countrymen, are you prepared to be held up as an associate of Jeffrey Dahmer, David Duke, or Timothy McVeigh? That is very ignorant, overly-simplified, xenophobic, and lame.

Most corrupt country in the world

[anticypher]

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

Kill the fucking spammers!

[TibbonZero]

This is easy. Help the world. Just go on a vigilante manhunt for any of these people. Take down all of them, one by one. I wouldn't convict you of any crimes. You're make the world (and the virtual world) a better place. Take all of the money they have stolen and give it to the poor that actually need it (i'm assuming that the poor in Nigeria rarely have internet access like these people do).