Slashdot Mirror
Times Are Tough For Nigerian Scammers
The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post reports that online swindling takes dedication even in the best of times but succeeding in the midst of a worldwide economic meltdown takes patience, resolve, and hard work. 'We are working harder. The financial crisis is not making it easy for them over there,' said Banjo, 24, speaking about Americans, whose trust he has won and whose money he has fleeced, via his Dell laptop. 'They don't have money. And the money they don't have, we want.' US authorities say Americans — the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers — still lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. 419 is cemented in Nigerian popular culture. and the scammers, known as 'yahoo-yahoo boys,' are glorified in pop songs such as 'Yahoozee,' which gained even more fame after former secretary of state Colin L. Powell danced to it at a London festival last year."
I only wish the reason was because our education was getting the job done.
I would have suspected that Americans might have fallen prey more easily. Hard times can lead to more desperate measures.
Or maybe people are turning off their Internet service...
Dark Reflection
Anyone else see the poetic justice in some back-jungle Shaman fleecing these guys out of their hard-swindled cash?
$300 for mojo powder...probably ashes from the fire he burns his extra cash in...Turtles on a string. I love it.
I'm doing exactly that. The fact that they "made it through the crisis" and many of their competitors didn't(and the guys who owed them money were bailed out, allowing those debts to be paid in full, so it isn't directly government money) merely makes them the most successful of the scammers.
And the difference between those people and Goldman's employees is?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
You need to look at African history again - I am certainly not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but warfare (and incidentally slavery) in Sub-Saharan Africa is as old as civilization in Sub-Saharan Africa. For example: Military History of the Mali Empire. The scale of the conflicts was never what it was in Europe and Asia until the 20th century, but that Africa was a collection of totally peaceful isolated tribes until Europeans arrived on the scene is a myth.
It's ironic, actually, the (arguably legitimate) western reaction against the excesses and cruelties of imperialism and colonialism ended up, in a fair number of cases, actually weakening understanding of the local populations, cultures, and history(and in a way oddly similar to the one that colonialism itself did).
The stock "history" of the bluntest anti-imperialist position is basically "And the noble savages lived happily in idyllic little tribes and Harmony with the land, until the British showed up and shot everyone and nicked their stuff." is almost exactly as reductive as the stock "history of the bluntest pro-imperialist position, which is basically "And the barbarious savages lived in primitive tribes, practicing devil worship and savagery, until the British showed up and civilized everybody and put the land to productive use."
"Agents of the colonial powers arrived on the scene of what was already, and had long been, a complex political and social stage, full of all kinds of various actors and groups, and had to shrewdly navigate a complex web of political interrelations and interactions in order to get anywhere." is much less cleanly satisfactory to either party; but is arguably much more accurate.
1) The correspondant writes for the WASHINGTON post, and SHE lives in SOUTH AFRICA. Where does it say anything about New York?
2) I think you seriously overestimate what a print journalist makes.
3) I think you seriously underestimate the conditions the Nigerian scammers (and the middle/upper class in their country) live in
Did you evern RTFA at all before you spouted your drivel!?
"young men with fancy cars, designer clothing and beautiful girlfriends -- scammers all"
"In good months, he said, he has made $30,000, which he blew on clothes, hotel rooms and Dom Perignon at "VVIP" clubs. These days, he lamented, proceeds are down 40 percent."
Yeah. Cry me a river. Poor starving Nigerian scammer, who I'm sure makes more in 3 months than the journalist made in a year. I bet it was LUKEWARM Dom Perignon, though! The agony!
I think that last bit could be a bit more accurate..
"Agents of the colonial powers arrived on the scene of what was already, and had long been, a complex political and social stage, full of all kinds of various actors and groups. And then they showed them how gunpowder works, whereupon the natives were so impressed they fell over and died."
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Meme or not, you and everyone in the Western world needs to get used to the idea that a very small number of Golden Boys on Wall Street, in cahoots with a somewhat larger number of politicians, managed to STEAL billions of dollars from small investors and taxpayers.
There has been little secrecy regarding deregulation of the securities and exchanges over the last 16 to 20 years. The democrats played ball with Wall Street when Clinton was in, then Bush came along and got serious about deregulation. Wall Street knew all along that they were selling worthless paper to fools who were happy to buy that worthless paper on credit. The emperor had no clothes, but no one wanted to recognize that fact.
Look at the events that brought down Wall Street in 1929, then look again at our recent crisis. Really look at them, then come back to explain any substantial differences.
If, and I emphasize IF, we really have reached the bottom, and we are on our way up again, then we have been far more lucky than we deserve. There were blatantly obvious signs of how much trouble we were in, as far back as the Enron scandal. A decent economist with a real education should have seen what was happening as much as 5 years before the Enron scandal broke.
Fools and crooks. To hold Goldman Sachs out as being better than the rest of Wall Street is to admit that they were fools, if lesser fools than their buddies sitting in offices all around them.
Don't be sick or the "meme". Instead, get sick of, and get outraged at our economics "experts" who dug the hole that we are in today. The meme is here, and it will be around for quite awhile. The only question is, are we going to learn from it, or will we do this again in 20 to 50 years?
Go on, call a spade a spade. Bigtime thieves and fools put the screws to all us little fools. And we are still damned fools, for allowing the bastards to have their bonuses. Plain English defines a bonus as something earned for superior performance. There is no one on Wall Street who has earned a bonus in recent history.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The FBI et. all don't actively pursue Nigerian scammers for the simple reason that they cannot pursue Nigerian scammers. It has nothing to do with "taking down the boss". If those Nigerians lived in the US they would be in jail. Period.
First, the US cannot go after Nigerian scammers because they live in frickin Nigeria, the US has no authority there and at best can only exert a moderate amount of pressure to encourage Nigerian officials to pursue the scammers.
Second, every US citizen has the right to be a dumbass. There was a story here on /. a few months ago of a woman who sent around $450k to a Nigerian scammer. She blew her husband's retirement on it even. The entire community knew it was happening, and tried to stop her, told her she was being scammed, hell the sheriff even asked her to stop, but there was nothing they could legally do to stop her from pissing her money away. She was convinced each time that she was just "one more payment" away from getting those millions of dollars. Where the hell her husband was this whole time I have no idea, but if someone wants to be a dumbass nobody has a right to stop you unless you are doing something illegal.
Getting scammed is not illegal.
Nigerian officials obviously aren't going to do more than a token attempt to go after these guys to improve US relations, because they boost the Nigerian economy. Think about it, they are getting US money by exporting idiocy. And Americans buy it in droves, unfortunately.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Great idea, it would certainly encourage all other "bad guys" to accept interviews with the medias...
Reporters do not shoot their informant, that is the way it works...
You could just as well ask clinton why did he not just shoot the "dear leader" in N Korea when he met him....
(ok so he'd die, the US Hostage also, but no price is too high ? oups of course there would be that little issue with being a suicide something getting a bad press recently..)
Funny but wrong.
A successful culture will adapt when new technology arrives. Japan dit it. China is doing it. Europe itself dit it, gunpowder after all isn't a western invention. Technology only gives a very temporary advantage, it is culture that matters.
Anyone who generalizes about slashdotters is a typical slashdotter.