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.
If these Nigerian scammers were any good, they'd be working at Goldman Sachs, not pulling penny-ante internet operations...
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
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I wonder if any nigerian has ever tried it? By the way, about the 419's, check out http://www.419eater.com/ Scambait is great!
He probably thinks of himself as a neutral party just reporting the news.
"With enemies you know where they stand but with neutrals? Who knows! It sickens me." ... Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?"
"What makes a man turn neutral
There must be some kind of famine or something in Nigeria, I've received about 15 emails in the last 3 months, all from people telling me their father/brother/uncle/etc. had "caught death". Terrible!
And to make matters worse, they can't get the money that's rightfully theirs from the banks! Honestly, something should really be done about this.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I don't know... living in New York myself, sweat like a pig in the swampy hellhole, where he gets to slap some stupid jitney driver in the unending clusterfuck they call traffic, and suck down a lukewarm coke in the muddy concrete and cardboard dump he calls home sounds exactly like here. You get those locales backwards or something?
Haida Manga
Probably for (in the broad sense) the same reasons that an undercover cop doesn't attempt to arrest the mob boss, and a spy is a diligent worker, not a slacker, at whatever facility he is infiltrating.
Journalists, ideally, are a society's way of getting and broadly disseminating certain types of information. In this case, the value of the public knowing more about Nigerian scammers is easily higher than the value of one scammer possibly getting a slap on the wrist, or even a bullet in the face. There are all sorts of situations where doing the proximate "right thing" will mean losing the broader advantage: taking down the little fish and missing out on the expose of the little fish's boss.
This is especially true in situations where the journalist is operating against the currents of official interest/motivation. If the feds, either here or in Nigera, really cared(about anything other than the highest profile and most exceptional or publicly emotive cases) they'd find it trivial to hunt down large numbers of these guys. Just get a whole bunch of spamtrap accounts, scattered randomly across common webmail services, ISP email offerings, and the like. When the inevitable submissions come, act like marks until you have enough info to track the guys down. In general, interest is limited. Thus, raising interest/awareness in the issue, and possibly helping people protect themselves more effectively, is a lot more valuable than just identifying some minor player who could have been identified already if anybody cared. (In the context of internal political reporting, the situation is similar. Corruption at the low levels is generally a symptom of much more serious high level corruption, and exists because the powers that be don't care. Raising the issue of a single corrupt cop or DMV chair warmer, or whatever, is nice; but is like trying to empty a lake with a shovel. You really want journalists to go for the core of the problem.)
So he would live and be able to write about it?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Who should I make the check out to?
My name is 'Shakrai' but my good friends call me 'Cash' :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Not so. He won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
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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.
I'm sceptical: there is plenty of evidence of contact and conflict between populations, tribes, and whatnot in Africa. Further, there are known instances of innovation in the service of success in those conflicts(Shaka's career in empire building being perhaps the notable example).
I'd be more inclined to blame quirks of geography and environmental biology. Africa has a massive interior area compared to its coastline, and IIRC, the worst ratio of navigable rivers to interior area of any inhabited continent. It also has few usefully domesticated animals. There goes most of your trade, beyond seriously high value/unit weight stuff.
The continent also, because of its climate and biology, has an enormous disease load, which imposes a substantial toll on all activities of life, particularly dire for dense populations(of the sort almost always associated with division of labor, and intellectual, technological, and social development).
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.
in 2003 I recovered $15,000 for someone who lost their money to a web based computer scam. It was not easy and I didn't kill anyone (at the request on my client). Africa is a dangerous place. I have been doing stuff for a while, the odds of you getting all your money back are pretty much 0%. In fact I would say I did not get my clients money back, I probably got them someone else's money.
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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
When I read the article, the thing that struck me was that the scammers are so desperate, they trying voodoo majic to boost their believability. One guy has a live tortoise hanging around his neck to boost his mojo. Sounds like a market ripe for a new product idea:
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The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Imagine being tricked by a con artist named Banjo. I wonder if he has a friend Kazooie.
Oh, no. They're not running low on fools. The fools are running low on money.
As others have pointed out, you need to review history a bit more. For about 1200 years, the "Moors" (derived meaning "Black") were the conquerors, taking millions of europeans and middle eastern people. Some estimate the number to be approx 40 million. When the Moors sided with the Arabic people, it was very very bad for the Europeans.
Not to say the Europeans were exactly innocent. The "political" systems in place lead to slavery of the general population by the nobility. Needless to say, border disputes were anything but friendly for centuries.
It's easy to believe that the Africans were simple people running around in small tribes who knew nothing but peace and avoiding being eaten by lions, but the Euro/American slave trade triangle was just another very dirty chapter in human history, not the only one like it.
But, if you'd prefer to believe your way, that's your decision. I must quote...
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana (1863-1952)
The Life of Reason (1905-1906)
Volume 1, Reason in Common Sense - pg 284
I like to believe that humanity had a kind, gentle history at some point, but in reality there's been an awful lot of blood shed and oppression. It's important for us to know the mistakes we've made before, so we can be better in our future.
Genetics have nothing to do with behavior. All humans are the same. They do learn from their environment. Greed has spread like an epidemic around the planet, and we're seeing the collapse of that system now. It's funny that the scam artists are now complaining that their marks are all running dry.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If you mean this : Media misunderstanding on GS and zloty it was more like media not making real research on a subject and repeating hearsay. IOW business as usual, as media these day , except for a few rare exception, are glorified parrot.
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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..)
Coccotti: Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I'm a Sicilian. And my old man was the world heavyweight champion of Sicilian liars. And from growin' up with him I learned the pantomime. Now there are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give him away. A guy has seventeen pantomimes. A woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen. And if you know 'em like ya know your own face, they beat lie detectors to hell. What we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don't wanna show me nothin'. But you're tellin' me everything. Now I know you know where they are. So tell me, before I do some damage you won't walk away from.
Cliff: Could I have one of those Chesterfields now?
Coccotti: Sure.
Cliff: Got a match? Oh, don't bother. I got one. So you're a Sicilian, huh?
Coccotti: Uh-huh.
Cliff: You know I read a lot. Especially things that have to do with history. I find that shit fascinating. In fact, I don't know if you know this or not, Sicilians were spawned by niggers.
Coccotti: Come again?
Cliff: It's a fact. Sicilians have nigger blood pumpin' through their hearts. If you don't believe me, look it up. You see, hundreds and hundreds of years ago the Moors conquered Sicily. And Moors are niggers. Way back then, Sicilians were like the wops in northern Italy. Blond hair, blue eyes. But, once the Moors moved in there, they changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin' with the Sicilian women, they changed the blood-line for ever, from blond hair and blue eyes to black hair and dark skin. I find it absolutely amazing to think that to this day, hundreds of years later, Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. I'm just quotin' history. It's a fact. It's written. Your ancestors were niggers. Your great, great, great, great, great-grandmother was fucked by a nigger, and had a half-nigger kid. That is a fact. Now tell me, am I lyin'?
:)
PS: Please direct all credit (or scorn) to True Romance.
Happy people make bad consumers.
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.
the "Moors" (derived meaning "Black")
In Latin, the word maurus (plural mauri) means coming from Mauretania...a Roman province on the north western fringe of Africa (-> Morocco) (see wikipedia) So basically Moors means those from North Africa. They aren't sub-Saharan. The core people of the Moors were "berbers"...Not arabs but not black either.
If you need a real successful "black" civilization. I suggest you to take a closer look at the Nubian civilization. They fought for centuries against the Egyptians, the Greek dynasty and they finally crushed a Roman invasion. The defeat was so devastating, that the Romans signed a peace treaty and they never came back. The Nubian queen are famous (Amanishaketo, etc) nowadays due to recent discoveries.
Or the Ethiopian one, they succeeded to stop the early Muslim invasion (this where the legendary King John was supposed to live, European crusaders tried for years to get in touch with him to fight together the Muslims). They fought for decades against the Italians and they were the first to gain their independence. The famous city of Timbuktu having healthy intellectual/philosophical debates while Europe was experiencing inquisition, etc.