Do they even have computers there? Why do they kick the butts of richer and bigger countries like Russia or China in the growing distressed-businessman-looking-for-bank-account-to-transfer-funds industry? Do they have some sort of school there? As I understand it, it’s not just one group that’s doing all this.
Of course they have computers in Nigeria. Why would you think they wouldn’t?
Why do they send out these emails? Because there are enough gullable people in the world to make it worth their while.
BTW, I work for an email security company and it is very difficult to differentiate these emails from legitimate emails. If you can think of a way for a software program to tell them apart please let me know.
Yes, they most certainly have computers in Nigeria. In most developing countries, you will find internet cafes in even small towns. Nigeria has the largest population in Africa, and with South Africa is one of the two most dominant countries south of the Sahara.
The Nigeria scam probably originated there simply because of the culture of corruption that became entrenched in the country after its oil boom. So much money became available in a short time that it encouraged corruption on a massive scale. (I spent a week in Nigeria in 1993, and bribery was far more prevalent there than anywhere else I’ve ever been.)
For a while I made it something of a hobby to collect Nigerian e-mails. (Now spam filters are good enough so I don’t get very many anymore.) While they were originally from Nigeria, over the past few years the majority have been purportedly from other places, such as the Ivory Coast, the UK, the Philippines, and so on. I believe it is still mainly Nigerians sending them, however.
Yes, when they include phone numbers they are generally Nigerian country codes (sometimes UK).
This is supposedly the third largest component of their GDP.
The “yahoo yahoo boys” are the heirs to old mail and fax versions, which also originated in Lagos.
http://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-37929.0.html
Conclusion: Nigerian culture is deeply corrupt and not likely to change soon.
A better question is how anyone (anyone) falls for them. They are still remarkably illiterate, implausible, and sloppy. If you send money to a Mr. Hughes Fred, who claims to be a government official or leading businessman in Sierra Leone, but asks you to call him at a Lagos cell number, or to e-mail him at yahoo.it, which is different from his webmail.cn originating address, and are willing to send him money to release the trunk full of greenbacks (my favorite question: yes, by all means I want you to pay the bank fee, or official tax, or courier payment – you have my authorization to take that out of the chest of cash immediately!), then you would likely have found another way to lose your money.
I received my first “Nigerian letter” by fax in the early 1990s.
Since I have visited or worked in various countries in Africa, my e-mail address is floating around there, and so I used to receive quite a few. I get them in both English and French; just a few days ago, I got one in Spanish, supposedly originating in the Ivory Coast.
Late 1990 I went to work for a bank. Part of my training was to recognize fake money and what different kinds of scams smelled like. The term “Nigerian Mafia” was dropped by my trainer and I nearly choked because it sounded like an absurd joke. Turned out he was quite serious.
I got an email forwarded to me by a concerned lower-echelon infantry guy when I was in Iraq. The email said the guy was a relative of someone that was executed by the Mujihideen. I had to spend about an hour looking into it even though it was clearly just another cookie-cutter version of the same ol “help me get this money out of the country” scam. I had to find out if the name given was a real guy, if he’d been killed, if there were any other propaganda on the killing, etc. Big mess…
Hell, I just got one from Arafat’s wife.
Has there been any e-mails or letters that look like a “Nigerian scam letter”, but turned out to be true?
If you really were a Nigerian Colonel with a bunch of gold to move, and needed help, I guess you would be pretty fucked.
It does seem odd that so many do come from Nigeria. I mean, if it’s so profitable, lots of others should be getting in on the act.
My guess is a combination of:
A high number of unemployed people with fuckall else to do. Like if you live in Brazil, and can’t find a job, you could probably do better pick-pocketing tourists or middle class locals. In Nigeria, not as good of an option.
In my limited experience, cheating people out of money as a job doesn’t carry much social stigma in West Africa.
Especially foreign white people. I was reading one of the 419 scam busters sites ages ago, and the scammers tried to defend their actions by saying they were re-patriating (is that a word?) money that was stolen via the slave trade. I’m sure they would have stopped the scam if they found out their victim was black, and they share all proceeds with the poor. :rolleyes:
They refer to their victims as “mugus” (fools) and (like lots of conmen) they, I suspect, justify their actions by citing the victims’ own greed, stupidity, venality (recall that many of the scams, though not all, are predicated on the notion of the Nigerian “official” and the mugu conspiring to divert money that rightfully belongs to some deceased official, or the government, etc.).
They’re doubly awful people given that much of Nigeria purports to be intensely Christian (in fact, one of the (many) giveaways in the scam e-mails I see is repeated and inappropriate references to “God’s blessings” in purportedly official government or business correspondence).
Not that my email security company has ever seen. Unfortunately, even though a reasonably intelligent person can instantly recognize one of these messages by the “overly formal language” and poor spelling it’s almost impossible to characterize them as a scam and not some badly written business email. How likely is it that some long lost relative died in some foreign country and left you with millions of dollars without you knowing something about it in advance? Not very likely.
I think the most cruel ones are the “UK Lottery Winner” scams. Some people actually believe they have won a lottery that they never actually entered.
Yeah, stop trying to use software programs, use people. Cloudmark works perfectly.
On a related note, I’d like to know why most of the hacking, cracking, virus and trojan writing and injection activity, and blog and forum spambot operations are based in Eastern Europe, specifically Russia, the Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania.
It’s because the Slavs are an organized, technically-minded race >=) it’s why Hitler feared us.
Do the other continents have their own cybercrime specialties? Or do all the computer-savvy people in China and India have jobs?
Well, the spam is not originating in China, but somebody’s making a lot of money routing it through bulletproof servers based there.
I’ve also seen accounts of domainjacking being clumsily conducted by various Chinese front companies.
And the “Canadian pharmacy” spam is being conducted (at least on the supply end) by someone (Indian or not, I don’t know) selling Indian-manufactured knockoff drugs. I also had a particularly persistent and voluminous porno spammer whom I got annoyed enough to track down and finally by calling his house at 10:00 a few nights in a row, convince to take me off his list. He was an Indian immigrant and had much of his family involved in his porn/spam ring.
You should have cussed that bastard out and reported his pathetic self to the police… I hate spammers!
It was kind of better than that. His wife picked up a few times and started denying that anyone named Dilip lived there. I scolded her, told her she had a pathetic husband, and asked why she was letting her porno-peddling hubby hide behind her skirts. I know from past experience this is about the best you can expect – the police have no jurisdiction, and the FTC, FBI, etc. don’t take action except in selected cases.
It would have been OTT and illegal, and I’d never do anything illegal, but the thought did cross my mind of reporting him as using models for whom the required proof-of-age was not on file or was forged (which might well turn out to be true). That might get some official attention, but I wasn’t willing to go there.
Similarly, if you decide to scambait, don’t spend too much time reporting your new African friend to Lagos PD H.Q. Scotland Yard does have a Nigerian Fraud desk (they may be too P.C. to call it that, or maybe they aren’t) but I do not get the impression they care too much, or have the resources to do anything with, individual complaints of spam. (They might get involved after a U.K. subject loses a few thousand pounds or gets jailed by crooked cops in Nigeria).
A few years ago I had a vacant room in my house and posted on a roommates website. I was innundated with the usual scam requests to cash huge checks from overseas and send back the difference between the check and the asked rent. I told all of them that I’m not a bank and wouldn’t be able to do that, but 3 people went ahead and sent me payment anyway. I threw away the checks for $3,000.00 and $1,800.00. I got some forged USPS money orders sent to me from people in West Africa, which I gave to the Post Office. They have a division which deals with that kind of thing specifically.
All 3 of them emailed me after a couple weeks asking where was the money, what was taking so long. I told them that I had given their payment to the FBI, and forwarded their email to them as well.
I never heard back from the would-be scammers or from the USPS either.