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Nigerian Scammers Scammed
sbinning writes "At least one Nigerian scammer has had the tables turned. A website admin retaliates against the fraudsters, with hilarious results." From The Age article: "When he found a willing victim, his anti-scam unfolded in much the same way as a typical 419 scam, promising payment only after a substantial investment had been laid down — in this case the receipt of a series of commissioned wooden carvings from a local artist. With some creative photo editing, Shiver Metimbers was able to string along his quarry with claims that the two carvings sent had mysteriously been damaged enroute, the first through a mysterious shrinking process, and the second by a rogue African hamster."
Slashdot is now officially a mirror site for Digg stories.
Thanks for the clarification.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Interesting question. If you go to the CIA world book web site, you can look at the income figures for all the countries in the world. If you happen to know the names of some African states, then you will be able to determine that there are only 3 countries in Africa that have notable income levels: South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria.
Of these three, South Africa is a regional super power, responsible for about half of all African economic activity. Egypt is second, but with less than half the output of South Africa and Nigeria's economy is somewhat smaller than Egypt. The rest of Africa is so undeveloped that it can be collectively ignored.
South Africa and Egypt both have diverse economies with mining, agriculture, industry and tourism. In the rest of Africa, people basically sit in the sun and wait for the bananas to grow, or they attack each other with spears and machetes to take each other's bananas.
The difference with Nigeria is that huge revenue is generated from oil exports. There isn't really any other economic activity in Nigeria. So, what you have in Nigeria, is a little economic development - just enough to whet the appetites of many people and since there isn't anything else to do, they end up gainfully employed in crime.
Another interesting point about Africa is that if you compare the whole continent with a relatively poor European state, such as Spain, you'll note that the economic output of Spain is about 4 times more than that of all of Africa. Compared with America, the total economic output of Africa is less than that of the state of California.
The situation in most of Africa is really quite hopeless and people depend of crime to survive.
Oh well, what the hell...