Scam artists

One of the well known facts about Nigeria, sadly is that fraud abounds. Much as I would love to portray the country in a good light all the time, one of the most commonly asked questions about Nigeria seems to be regarding email scams otherwise known as 419. Apparently the number "419" refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code (part of Chapter 38: "Obtaining Property by false pretences; Cheating") dealing with fraud.

So how does it work, well, some clever person, sits in an internet café somewhere in Nigeria, pens an email and sends it out to lots of unsuspecting potential victims. Fortunately, some of us are savvy enough to spot this and delete the email having recognised it for what it is, a scam.

I'm not saying that these types of scams are only propagated in Nigeria, however, the country seems to have worldwide recognition for it. For example, I was made to understand that the former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo had a load of emails sent out in his name. He used to be known as Charles Soludo, but after getting wind of these scams has preferred to start using his middle name and you will note that he is now referred to as Chukwuma Soludo.

This scam business is so well recognised that there are even a number of websites dedicated to it mentioning Nigeria specifically. For the purposes of this blog, i.e. to keep it short I will not be putting in any examples of these scam emails, however, you can check out the website for examples:
http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Crimes/Business/nigerian.htm

Even the popular internet information website, wikkipedia has a section dedicated to this, see link below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_fee_fraud

Here is an excerpt from the very detailed Wikkipedia article:



"An advance-fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance sums of money in the hope of realizing a significantly larger gain.[1] Among the variations on this type of scam, are the Nigerian Letter (also called the 419 fraud, Nigerian scam, Nigerian bank scam, or Nigerian money offer[2]),[3] the Spanish Prisoner, the Black money scam as well as Russian/Ukrainian scam (also extremely widespread, though far less popular than the former). The so-called Russian and Nigerian scams stand for wholly dissimilar organised-crime traditions; they therefore tend to use altogether different breeds of approaches."

So my message is twofold:

Everyone out there, please be aware of this fraud and be careful. Having said that, as long as you are aware of these types of scams and use common sense then this should not put you off from doing business in Nigeria, as there are a lot of business opportunities.

Nigerians are by nature very intelligent people and I would love to see this intelligence being used for something more constructive than these 419 scams. Yes, life can be hard in Nigeria, but there are other more honest ways of making a living, it may not necessarily pull in millions, but at least you have the peace of mind of being on the right side of the law. Of course, I realise that it is only a small percentage of the populations who are involved in these scams but those are the people I am referring to.