** Please visit our website: http://www.africanassociation.org **
Internet Scammers Keep Working in Nigeria
By DULUE MBACHU
Associated Press Writer
August 7, 2005, 8:07 AM EDT
LAGOS, Nigeria -- In Festac Town, an entire community of scammers overnights
on the Internet. By day they flaunt their smart clothes and cars and hang
around the Internet cafes, trading stories about successful cons and near
misses, and hatching new plots.
Festac Town is where communication specialists operating underground sell
foreign telephone lines over which a scammer can purport to be calling from
any city in the world. Here lurk master forgers and purveyors of such
software as "e-mail extractors," which can harvest e-mail addresses by the
million. Now, however, a 3-year-old crackdown is yielding results, Nigerian
authorities say.
Nuhu Ribadu, head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, says cash
and assets worth more than $700 million were recovered from suspects between
May 2003 and June 2004. More than 500 suspects have been arrested, more than
100 cases are before the courts and 500 others are under investigation, he
said.
The agency won its first big court victory in May when Mike Amadi was
sentenced to 16 years in prison for setting up a Web site that offered juicy
but phoney procurement contracts. Amadi cheekily posed as Ribadu himself and
used the agency's name. He was caught by an undercover agent posing as an
Italian businessman.
This month the biggest international scam of all -- though not one involving
the Internet -- ended in court convictions. Amaka Anajemba was sentenced to
2 1/2 years in prison and ordered to return $25.5 million of the $242
million she helped to steal from a Brazilian bank.
The trial of four co-defendants is to start in September.
Day in, day out, a strapping, amiable 24-year-old who calls himself Kele B.
heads to an Internet cafe, hunkers down at a computer and casts his net upon
the cyber-waters.
Blithely oblivious to signs on the walls and desks warning of the penalties
for Internet fraud, he has sent out tens of thousands of e-mails telling
recipients they have won about $6.4 million in a bogus British government
"Internet lottery."
"Congratulation! You Are Our Lucky Winner!" it says.
So far, Kele says, he has had only one response. But he claims it paid off
handsomely. An American took the bait, he says, and coughed up "fees" and
"taxes" of more than $5,000, never to hear from Kele again.
Festac Town, a district of Lagos where the scammers ply their schemes, has
become notorious for "419 scams," named for the section of the Nigerian
penal code that outlaws them.
Why Nigeria? There are many theories. The nation of 130 million, Africa's
most populous, is well educated, and English, the lingua franca of the scam
industry, is the official language. Nigeria bursts with talent, from former
NBA star Hakeem Olajuwon to Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka.
But with World Bank studies showing a quarter of urban college graduates are
unemployed, crime offers tempting career opportunities -- in drug dealing,
immigrant-trafficking, oil-smuggling, and Internet fraud.
The scammers thrived during oil-rich Nigeria's 15 years of brutal and
corrupt military rule, and democracy was restored only six years ago.
"We reached a point when law enforcement and regulatory agencies seemed
nonexistent. But the stance of the present administration has started
changing that," said Ribadu, the scam-busting chief.
President Olusegun Obasanjo is winning U.S. praise for his crackdown.
Interpol, the FBI and other Western law enforcement agencies have stepped in
to help, says police spokesman Emmanuel Ighodalo, and Nigerian police have
received equipment and Western training in combating Internet crime and
money-laundering.
Experts say Nigerian scams continue to flood e-mail systems, though many are
being blocked by spam filters that get smarter and more aggressive. America
Online Inc. Nicholas Graham says Nigerian messages lack the telltale signs
of other spam -- such as embedded Web links -- but its filters are able to
be alert to suspect mail coming from a specific range of Internet addresses.
Also, the scams have a limited shelf life.
In the con that Internet users are probably most familiar with, the e-mailer
poses as a corrupt official looking for help in smuggling a fortune to a
foreign bank account. E-mail or fax recipients are told that if they provide
their banking and personal details and deposit certain sums of money,
they'll get a cut of the loot.
But there are other scams, like the fake lotteries.
Kele B., who won't give his surname, says he couldn't find work after
finishing high school in 2000 in the southeastern city of Owerri, so he
drifted with friends to Lagos, where he tried his hand at boxing.
Then he discovered the Web.
Now he spends his mornings in Internet cafes on secondhand computers with
aged screens, waiting "to see if my trap caught something," he says.
Elekwa, a chubby-faced 28-year-old who also keeps his surname to himself,
shows up in Festac Town driving a Lexus and telling how he was jobless for
two years despite having a diploma in computer science.
His break came four years ago when the chief of a fraud gang saw him solve
what seemed like "a complex computer problem" at a business center in the
southeastern city of Umuahia and lured him to Lagos.
He won't talk about his scams, only about their fruits: "Now I have three
cars, I have two houses and I'm not looking for a job anymore."
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, visit:
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/aam.html
AAM Website: http://www.africanassociation.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
