Slashdot Mirror
Jail 'Greedy' Scam Victims, Says Nigerian Diplomat
AcidAUS writes with this nearly unbelievable snippet from today's Sydney Morning Herald: "The Nigerian high commissioner in Australia says people who are ripped off by so-called Nigerian scams are just as guilty as the fraudsters and should be jailed. Responding to a story in yesterday's Herald, which revealed Australians lose at least $36 million a year to the online scams, Sunday Olu Agbi said Australians had failed to heed repeated warnings not to deal with shady characters on the internet."
If you are dumb enough to fall for one of the oldest fraud methods in existence, you deserve to lose you money, but not your freedom.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
I applaud his forward thinking in trying to get rid of stupid people, but I really don't think jail is an option. We're just gonna have to put up with them. Sorry man.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
"It's hard to con an honest man."
why not block all automatic financial/bank transactions with Nigeria? Make it so some body has to sign for it, etc.
heck....if both parties are "guilty", why not put road-blocks to block both?
Why not RTFM?
"Professor Olu Agbi said there were almost 140 million people in Nigeria and fewer than 0.1 per cent were involved."
That's a great idea! Let's make it harder for the 99.9% of law abiding people because of a couple of jack-asses. Furthermore let's make sure we invest a lot of government money to put this new sign-off system in place... at least $36M+/year to make it extra ironic.
RTFA. He isn't suggesting people be jailed for stupidity, he's suggesting they be jailed for willingly aiding in a crime (or at least believing they are).
It's articles like this where the summary has completely missed the point that really highlights just how bad slashdotters are when it comes to reading articles. TFA is short and clear about the what the man was really suggesting and yet already some 90% of (non-joke) comments are about how stupidity isn't a crime.
And shame on the slashdot editor who posted this. I can't believe anyone could miss the point of the article so badly, so either he didn't read it or he deliberately went with a misleading summary for the extra "outrage" comments.
I'll post the pertinent bit here to save everyone the terrible inconvenience of clicking the article link:
In one version, the scammer poses as a government worker who has embezzled millions of dollars and is offering victims a percentage if they help retrieve the money by providing a relatively small amount of money for bribes or other charges.
Professor Olu Agbi said "greedy" Australians who tried to partake in these crimes - even though they are scams - should be arrested as well.
"People who send their money are as guilty as those who are asking them to send the money," he said.
Not so outrageous now is it?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Swing and a miss. Gotta try harder for a Funny mod.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Sorry, but the victims are innocent until proven guilty. They haven't _yet_ undertaken anything criminal, just arguably shown intent. I don't want to be a stickler, but that means they get the benefit of the doubt.
Jailing the victim is asinine and a sure sign that the authorities are lazy and stupid themselves.
How is this any different to saying that a girl that goes into a rough neighbourhood in a mini-skirt and is raped should also be jailed? Just because someone puts themself in a position where they are easy prey doesn't mean that we should lash out against them if we find it difficult to prosecute the criminal.
What they'll do is make it a crime to send money. A few years ago they made it illegal in NSW, Australia to leave your car unlocked. The rationale was that stolen cars were being used to commit crime and a deterent was needed to stop people making their cars easy to steal. Never mind the inconvenient fact that glass windows are trivial to break. Personally I think this had more to do with car insurance fraud than a crime epidemic. So now rushing to work and forgetting to lock your car makes you a criminal, rather than just making you negligent (and possibly causing you to forfeit an insurance claim).
I think people who don't understand their role as a public servant and propose solutions like making a victim a criminal should be sacked, if not jailed themselves.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I somehow doubt he actually believes in jailing these people. He's simply pointing out their guilt, to reduce the guilt of his own country's people.
> WRONG. The scammer wants to make money from the deal. How are they going to coax the mark into giving them money when they claim to already have lots.
He's saying that honest people are also easy to scam, but that you have to use different methods on them (e.g. via fake charity scams).
He's not saying that the people who got scammed in 419 scams like those in this story are honest (they usually have you agree to break some financial law).
I do NOT think that scam VICTIMS need to be jailed, whether they are greedy or not.
Yes, you'd have to be a total numbskull to believe some of the stories that scammers use. But if you read the next paragraph, you'll see that even someone who isn't "stupid" can be fooled. Ridiculous and obvious scams come with stories that your uncle's long-lost twin (separated at birth) who lived in Zimbabwe and ran a diamond mine just died in a tragic car accident and you were the only beneficiary in his will, please email over your bank account number and routing info, or that Nigeria's silicon tycoon needs to transfer a billion dollars to a company in the United States but due to some extremely complicated circumstances related to a jacked up political climate, they need to park the funds in the bank account of someone who is trustworthy and you came highly recommended, and they'll leave you 1% of the money as a fee for your troubles (that comes out to ten million bucks), please email us your bank account number, routing info, a photocopy of your driver license and passport, etc., etc., etc., well, all I can say is that if you actually believe any of this shit, you need to be educated. Read about the so-called 419 Scam among others. Yes, you'd have to be "greedy" to fall for such a scam. Should you be jailed? No. You're still the victim of a crime.
Some scams sound more realistic than the ones above. For example, I once received an email bearing a friend's email address as the "From:" address and claiming that he had lost his passport and/or wallet while on vacation in Africa, and due to complications with the local authorities, he needed to borrow $1000 to pay some fine and get out of jail (money which he would supposedly pay back upon returning home). I called my friend on the phone and it turned out that he was safe and sound here at home, not in Africa. Someone had jacked his email password or otherwise hacked into his email account. Apparently, everyone in his address book received such an email. This is the type of scam that even discerning people could fall for. You have to be really, really, really careful not to fall for some of this stuff.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
To do nothing about overt racism under the guise of apathy, makes you a tacit racist.
It's not the nanny states job to stop racism or Slash Dot's, it's yours, and mine, and everybody's who cares about humanity.
Quick, while a few are still alive, find a WW2 concentration camp survivor, talk to them about what it was like before Hitler came to power, they acted just like you.
The fact still stands that any simple moral analysis of the state of the 'victims' showed that they conspired to defraud either a sovereign state or certain inhabitants of one - and lost out as a result.
Honesty in these cases would have saved them their losses
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
This is the nigerian scam we are talking about, the grand-daddy of them all AND the scam would involve the "victim" commiting fraud. This is illegal.
Let me try this on you.
Say a drug dealer sell you 1 kg of cocaine. Are you then a criminal and deserve to go to jail?
Now say that drug dealer is a scammer and sells you a bag of baking powder instead. You however think it is cocaine, would you go to jail for this?
Probably not, because it is NOT a crime to buy baking powder for an insane price. Morally? Maybe, after all, you thought you were dealing in drugs.
But with the nigerian scam you tend to actually have to attempt to commit a crime, fraud to get it all going.
Do you think people who buy "cheap" goods that are obviously stolen should be done for receiving?
The nigerian guy is just upset that this scam is giving his country a bad rep when the victims are hardly victims but instead people who in their greed were ready to defraud the nigerian goverment. Let us not forget what the scam is, these "victims" were ready to steal millions from a 3rd world nation.
Not everyone who falls for a scam deserves sympathy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
but you CAN give it a direction. I've said this a thousand times. There will always be people stupid/desperate/greedy enough to do something like this. Hell, two good friends of mine who I always thought were very intelligent fell victim to an Amway like scam. (Same company different name).
When I showed them all of the websites talking about the scam they realized what a big mistake was. At least they only lost $400. Most people who fall for this lose their life savings.
My mother is internet stupid. She's not a dumb person this is just alien to her. I showed her the power of google to answer her questions and now she uses it all the time to research businesses that she wants to work with. In fact, I think google helped her become Internet savvy.
I truly believe that people who fall for scams like this should be forced to serve time. Give them solid time to think about their actions and how society should be forced to help the Darwin award winners of today.
The biggest problem here is the Nigerian government. They are well aware that the 409 scams bring in millions of dollars a year into their economy, and is probably one of their biggest revenue streams for the country. Since they have little else to offer the world, they are not about to stop the money flow