Online scams
Scam: A confidence trick, confidence game, also known as a con, scam, grift or flim flam, is an attempt to intentionally mislead a person or persons (known as the “mark”) usually with the goal of financial or other gain. (wikipedia.org)
I have written about online shopping scam on eBay. As a sort of update here is a story about a teenager from Lagos, Nigeria, who is a successful businessman in the eyes of his friends: he makes a lot of money on the Internet. With stolen credit cards and other kinds of online fraud…
Akin is 14, wears Adidas sneakers, a Rolex Submariner watch, and a kilo of gold around his neck. Akin, who lives in Lagos, is one of a new generation of entrepreneurs that has emerged in this city of 15 million, Nigeria’s largest. His mother makes $30 a month as a cleaner, his father about the same hustling at bus stations. But Akin has made it big working long days at Internet cafes and is now the main provider for his family and legions of relatives. Call him a “Yahoo! millionaire.”
Akin buys things online - laptops, BlackBerries, cameras, flat-screen TVs - using stolen credit cards and aliases. He has the loot shipped via FedEx or DHL to safe houses in Europe, where it is received by friends, then shipped on to Lagos to be sold on the black market. (He figures Americans are too smart to sell a camera on eBay to a buyer with an address in Nigeria.)
Akin’s main office is an Internet. He spends up to ten hours a day there, seven days a week, huddled over one of 50 computers, working his scams.
And he’s not alone: The cafe is crowded most of the time with other teenagers, like Akin, working for a “chairman” who buys the computer time and hires them to extract e-mail addresses and credit card information from the thin air of cyberspace. Akin’s chairman, who is computer illiterate, gets a 60 percent cut and reserves another 20 percent to pay off law enforcement officials who come around or teachers who complain when the boys cut school. That still puts plenty of cash in Akin’s pocket.
A sign at the door of the cafe reads, WE DO NOT TOLERATE SCAMS IN THIS PLACE. DO NOT USE E-MAIL EXTRACTORS OR SEND MULTIPLE MAILS OR HACK CREDIT CARDS. YOU WILL BE HANDED OVER TO THE POLICE. NO 419 ACTIVITY IN THIS CAFE. The sign is a joke; 419 activity, which refers to the section of the Nigerian law dealing with obtaining things by trickery, is a national pastime. There are no coherent laws relating to e-scams, the police are mostly computer illiterate, and penalties for financial crimes are light. No penalties for breaking the law
“What do you want me to do?” Akin asks in English. “It is my God-given talent. Our politicians, they do their own; me, I’m doing my own. I feed my family - my sister, my mother. Man must survive.”
The scams perpetrated by Akin and his comrades are many and varied: moneygram interceptions, Western Union hijackings, check laundering, identity theft, and outright begging, with tall tales of dying relatives and large sums of money in search of safe haven. One popular online fraud often practiced by women (or boys pretending to be women) involves separating lonely men from their money.
But last November the Economic Fraud and Financial Crimes Commission won a high-profile case that had dragged on for years against Emmanuel Nwude, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years for bilking a Brazilian bank out of $242 million using an Internet scam involving phony bank drafts. The commission is also pursuing a case against 419 kingpin Fred Ajudua, a lawyer and businessman accused of using the Internet to steal $1 million from a victim in Germany.
[source: money.cnn.com]
The story should make you remember that each time you submit your confidential information online you are subject to a high risk of becoming a victim of a scammer. It should not stop you from buying online and getting other benefits that the Internet provides, but it definitely should make you careful.
The fact that the people are not punished for this type of crime make them invulnerable. It is the only business that provides them with a good income in their country, it is their full time job (no freelancing here), so they use their imagination and think hard of new ways to make them more profitable. Just keep in mind this kind of people is out there and on the search for taking your money from you. Do not give them a chance.
[tag]online fraud, scam, credit card, Nigeria, Lagos, ebay[/tag]
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