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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?"
you can start by sending the money.
It's been 6 months...
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't know what i'm talking about so could you Please stop reading my post.
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!
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.)