Match.com used to be plagued with Russian bride spam. After a year-long infestation of “I am Svetlana and I admire you structure” email messages pissed off their membership and threatened their reputation, Match hit upon a brilliant solution - block Russia and Eastern Europe. Duh! Anyhow, most of the spam went away immediately (snaps fingers).
Why doesn’t eBay just block access from Nigeria and satellite ISPs that serve Nigerian cybercafes? In the thread linked above, someone answered:
However, there must be some common IPs that the Nigerian scammers use. On my Web site, there are few Nigerian spammers that originate from Nigerian IPs; most have Israeli IPs, because several satellite ISPs from that country provide service to cybercafes in Nigeria.
I’m also curious: does Nigerian scamming benefit eBay in some way?
Nigeria is still a large country with a population of 140 million people, not all of which are spammers of scammers. Blocking the entire nation would deprive eBay of a sizable market (admittedly not the most important of eBay’s markets, but why should they not serve it?) and piss of Nigerians and people who might think it’s not appropriate to discriminate against an entire nation just because of a few rotten apples in the basket.
I actually was in Nigeria for two weeks, back in the mid-90s, and I can certainly attest from personal experience that corruption is rife. Coming into the country, immigration, customs, everyone had their hand out and was offering to make the process difficult for us if we didn’t provide dash (i.e., small bribes or “tips.”) We had been warned not to give in, and that made life kinda interesting.
On the other hand, we met many lovely people, as educated and intelligent as anywhere, and perfectly honest. (In fact, the reason we were there was that our clients were losing employees and were afraid it was because they paid everything open and honest, and their competitors lured people away with under-the-table non-reported cash.)
The scammers know that Nigeria has a reputation for corruption and so play on that. An email from someone in Switzerland or Denmark offering to slip you a few million for cooperating with their scam, well, that wouldn’t be so credible. So, blocking “Nigeria” wouldn’t actually stop the scammers and would be very irritating to a large, innocent, population.
To support Dex’s last point, the last half dozen Nigerian scams I received were from Hong Kong, Netherlands, and the UK. Even when the printed address is some place in Lagos or Abuja, the e-mail came out of other countries.
I’d seriously wonder if honest Nigerians can buy or sell anything on eBay - I’ve never seen one try, but I would think they’re going to have a lot of hassle with nearly every transaction. People will be very reluctant to deal with them anyway, just because of their nationality.
