Who's behind those Nigerian email scams?

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.

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