Signs in the Steadylink cafe in Festac Town, Lagos. (Eamon Kircher-Allen/GlobalPost)

Who's behind those Nigerian email scams?

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Welcome to the Lagos suburb of Festac Town, known as the center of internet fraud.

By Eamon Kircher-Allen — Special to GlobalPost

Published: July 21, 2009 05:33 ET
Updated: July 22, 2009 07:50 ET

LAGOS, Nigeria — Remember that Nigerian prince who contacted you a few months back, saying he’d pay you to help transfer his inheritance to the United States?

All he needed was your bank account details, and you’d be well on the way to riches — or at least on the way to seeing your riches siphoned off to an enterprising Nigerian.

Chances are that email was sent from a console somewhere in Festac Town, a quiet, ramshackle suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. Here, a cluster of net cafes are rumored in Lagos’ press to be some of the last holdouts against a Nigerian federal crackdown on the country’s email scammers.

In the last two years, the Electronic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) of Nigeria has been putting scammers in jail. The commission has invited journalists on a successful high-profile operation to apprehend a scamming ring and has helped foil Nigerian-led groups that ran multimillion-dollar fraud schemes. In a 2007 report, the EFCC said it handled more than 18,000 advanced-fee fraud cases, a six-fold increase in just four years.

Now, even the net cafes in Festac are feeling the heat.

Festac Town was once a posh, park-lined suburb of low apartment buildings that the Nigerian government built in 1977, during the country’s first oil boom, to house participants in the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. The festival drew tens of thousands from around the world, and Festac remained an upscale, desirable neighborhood until the 1980s.

But in the 1980s and 1990s, Festac deteriorated, and its wealthier residents left for newer neighborhoods. Soon it was flooded with educated, jobless youths hanging on to the bottom edge of Lagos’s middle class. These young people now populate the internet cafes. Like Festac Town’s apartment buildings, they were made for a future of far more promise.

One cafe, Steadylink Communication, is a dimly lit, third-floor place with unfinished plywood cubicles. Signs on the walls warn that the EFCC is watching. Some customers look rankled by the presence of a foreigner with a notepad.

But while the EFCC efforts may be making people jumpy, they haven’t stopped the scammers. The Internet Crime and Complaint Center (IC3), a U.S. federal body that tracks crime on the web, actually reported an increase last year in the percentage of internet crimes in the United States perpetrated by Nigerians. For years, the IC3 has ranked Nigeria as the No. 3 source of internet crimes in the world, behind the United States and the United Kingdom. But internet penetration in Nigeria is less than 7 percent. That means Nigerian scammers are particularly prolific.

Comments:

6 Comments.

Posted by david wayne osedach on July 21, 2009 10:19 ET

After all the extensive bad press I find it difficult to believe that millions of people continue to get scammed with these fraudulent schemes. Follow one cardinal rule: if something sounds dodgy on the internet - it is.

Posted by Branker on July 22, 2009 01:59 ET

It's all about greed and the people who fall for this are a mix of naive, stupid and greedy. That's why organizations like 419 Eaters are around to try and scam the scammers.

You should check out some of the pics that people have taken of the scammers getting to do things like shave their heads and show signs.

Posted by Obaro Abadioru on July 23, 2009 11:58 ET

What a pity scam E-mails have become synonymous with Nigeria as a nation, Nigerians as a people and as a concept. These days, most foreigners associate ‘Nigeria’ as a psuedonym for Scam. What a pity that geniune Nigerians especially the ones living abroad who are honest and work hard for their income also bear the brunt of an inglorous few ‘bad apples that are spoiling the whole bunch’.

Posted by Yusuf on July 25, 2009 06:59 ET

Everyday in my inbox I receieve these types of emails and all from this country. They think they can make fool to Indian people.

Posted by Leon H. Carey on July 25, 2009 09:23 ET

About 3 years ago I was hooked by these Nigerian type scammers.I received e-mails from Nigeria, the UK, Canada, and the USA. They were supposedly coming from these places, for the fake money grams, bogus checks etc were. I later came to my senses and wrote my first book 'Scammers Among Us Beware' published by Eloquent Books. This book may be viewed and purchased on Amazon.com, BN.com, and eloquentbooks.com. This is a self-help guide on how to, how not to, what to do if, and who to contact should you be. It is comprised of data from agencies from the USA, Canada, the UK, and Interpol. Check it out for it just may save you your bank account. Thank you.

Posted by silver93350 on September 4, 2009 01:02 ET

Interesting article. I am now against those internet cafes. They need to something to regulate what people do at the computer. My mailbox is always littered with these silly scams. Sometimes when I am bored I just send them a email and mess with them. What is funny is that I am website designer and own an anti-scam site and these email are sent to that account? Then there story goes straight to my site.

http://www.report-online-scams.com/how-do-inheritance-scams-work.html