Well worth reading. Link here.
As patient as fishermen, the young men toil day and night, trawling for replies to the e-mails they shoot to strangers half a world away.
Most recipients hit delete, delete, delete, delete without ever opening the messages that urge them to claim the untold riches of a long-lost deceased second cousin, and the messages that offer millions of dollars to help smuggle loot stolen by a corrupt Nigerian official into a U.S. account.
But the few who actually reply make this a tempting and lucrative business for the boys of Festac, a neighborhood of Lagos at the center of the cyber-scam universe. The targets are called maghas — scammer slang from a Yoruba word meaning fool, and refers to gullible white people.
But what’s disgusting to read is stuff like this:
The e-mail scammers here prefer hitting Americans, whom they see as rich and easy to fool. They rationalize the crime by telling themselves there are no real victims: Maghas are avaricious and complicit.
To them, the scams, called 419 after the Nigerian statute against fraud, are a game.
…”Nobody feels sorry for the victims,” Samuel said.
Scammers, he said, “have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy. They say the American guy has a good life. There’s this belief that for every dollar they lose, the American government will pay them back in some way.”
They have no clue. No clue about the many lives absolutely destroyed by these scams. No clue about the hurt and harm they create.
Alex Eckelberry
(Thanks Sam)