12/31/2014 What I Learned Hanging Out With Nigerian Email Scammers | Mother Jones

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What I Learned Hanging Out With NigerianEmail ScammersOn a recent trip to the West African country, two fraudsters schooled me in the tricks oftheir trade.

Feng Yu (http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?people_number=&commercial_ok=&search_cat=&searchterm=email&people_ethnicity=&anyorall=all&searchtermx=&color=&media_

type=images&photographer_name=&search_source=search_form&language=en&lang=en&version=llv1&ref_site=photo&orient=&sho

w_color_wheel=1&people_gender=&people_age=&safesearch=1&prev_sort_method=popular&sort_method=relevance2&page=1)

/Shutterstock

I just returned from a reporting trip to Nigeria, where I was traveling around the countrytalking to terrorism experts, nomadic cattle herders, and government officials about howglobal warming affects conflict in the country. I lucked out with an amazing fixer. As anewswire reporter focused on the terrorist group Boko Haram, he was able to providecrucial context for my story. But Michael* also grew up a "street boy," meaning he wasable to make fast friends in the slum villages and farming communities we visited. Heput himself through college, and after working as a Nigerian soap opera actor and door­to­door men's clothing salesman, he clawed his way into journalism. Before that, heused to hang out with nomadic cow­herding kids, children who sell bottled water by theroadside, and budding scam artists. Yes, Nigerian scam artists, like the ones who sendyou emails purporting to be from an African prince who will pay you to help him move$3 million into your country, and all you have to do is give him your bank accountnumber. I told Michael I wanted to interview his scammer friends. He said there was noway that his dudes would talk for less than $600. Shocker. Of course, at MotherJones we don't pay for interviews. But I figured I'd be doing a public service bydistracting the scammers from conning old folks for a couple hours. So I offered $100for a rare glimpse at the human faces behind the syntax­challenged spam. We settledon $130, and off we went.

I sat down with Sheye and Danjuma* on the back patio of a fancy duplex in an upscaleneighborhood in one of the country's main cities, and the two dished on their craft,

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constantly interrupting each other as they downed bottles of Nigerian Star lager andchain­smoked. Though they lie for a living, Sheye insisted, "We are telling you the factand the truth."

Sheye and Danjuma have a name for the advance­fee email scams, in which victimsagree to to send money to a stranger, banking on the promise of love or fast money.They called these cons "Yahoo" jobs, pronounced Ya­OO.

A scam email I received recently.

"We go on the internet…We start making friend with you," Danjuma says, explainingthat they trawl Facebook and dating websites incessantly, looking for lonely women withmoney to spare. He knows if he meets "a Saudi Arabia person," he's in luck. "They don'tknow what to do with money."

"Whenever we want to fraud somebody, we will know what you are worth," Danjumasays. "Where are you working?" Even "how much you have in your account." They glean

12/31/2014 What I Learned Hanging Out With Nigerian Email Scammers | Mother Jones

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"We are not scaredof any minister orpresident. We arenot scared ofhim…Fuck him."

all this information just by developing a tight relationship with the dupe. If the mark isworthwhile, the scammer works up "a level of trust," Danjuma continues. "Maybe theperson doesn't have a husband, and the person is looking for a husband in Nigeria.Maybe…you need a black man," he says, his down­sloping eyes very serious.

At that point, the scammer will start to "give [the victim] a process," promising to comevisit her, but asking for money to take care of a few things first: "My car has problem,"or "My father is in Italy. He did not send money for me."

"Because you love me, then you say, 'Okay,'" Sheye interrupts. "I go and withdraw mymoney. I keep on enjoying with my girls here." He laughs wildly.

Over the past decade or so, the United States has cracked down(http://www.technewsdaily.com/6675­feds­crack­down­nigerian­online­scammers.html) on Nigerian

Internet scams. Western Union, for example, would not allow me to wire my Nigerianfixer an advance portion of his pay because, the operator told me, I was likely the victimof fraud. Still, Nigerian fraudsters manage to dupe Americans into forking thousands ofdollars over to complete strangers each year. In 2011, the FBI received(http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2011_IC3Report.pdf) close to 30,000 reports of advance

fee ploys, called "419 scams" after the section of the Nigerian criminal code thatoutlaws fraud. The agency received (http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2012_IC3Report.pdf)

over 4,000 complaints of advance fee romance scams in 2012, with victim lossestotaling over $55 million. Nigerians aren't the only ones committing internationaladvance fee fraud, but nearly one­fifth (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/who­made­

that­nigerian­scam.html) of all such scams originate in the West African country. The scams

often involve phony lottery winnings, job offers, and inheritance notices.

Ten years ago, Sheye and Danjuma, who are both in their mid­30s, say they couldmake up to 2 million naira—about $12,000—per Yahoo job, but the "US are very wise"now, Sheye says. They typically only make about $200 per "client" these days, thoughthey know other scammers who still rake in millions of naira through the emailschemes. "There is this boy in Kaduna [a city in northern Nigeria] who made over 2million naira" last year on 419 scams, Danjuma says. "And he is not even 18."

The two fraudsters make most of their money dupingfellow Nigerians. (They insist that tricking people is not thesame as stealing. "We don't thief," Danjuma says.) Theytold me about one elaborate scam, called Elawala (or"Let's go" in Igbo, one of the languages spoken in Nigeria),that they occasionally pull on their countrymen. It involvesa taxi cab, a "juju man," magic charms, and a huge bag ofcash (and it's way too complicated to explain here).Another go­to scam involves a taxi cab, a French man, a

locked box filled with gold, and very expensive pliers. (Ditto.) They asked to hire me outfor a day for one of their cons because, they said, my white skin would bolster theircredibility. "Black man believes that white man is reality," Danjuma explains.

They make a tidy living. Sheye and Danjuma say they are each worth about $60,000, ina country where more than 70 percent of the population(http://www.unicef.org/wcaro/Countries_1320.html) lives on less than $2 a day. They say they'd

make a lot more than that, but they blow much of their income entertaining "clients" inorder to convince the victims they're legit. They'll fly potential marks to Ghana, forexample, and put them up in a fancy hotel while they meet with Sheye and Danjuma'sfaux business partners there. Since Ghana is a less corrupt country, they say, victimsare more likely to enter into a business deal with a Ghanaian than a Nigerian. The twosay they own homes worth about a quarter million dollars each.

The Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is tasked with cracking downon con men like these. So is Interpol. The duo says they are able to skirt lawenforcement because they have a lot of people on their payroll. "They're all criminals,"Danjuma explains. They estimate that 30 percent of their earnings go to what they call"security"—that is, the payment of bribes. "We are not scared of any minister or

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president," Danjuma says, his words slightly slurred by the third 20­ounce bottle of Star."We are not scared of him…Fuck him."

They justify what they do by claiming that the highest levels of the Nigerian governmentare ridden with scammers. The fancy neighborhood where we meet backs up against aslum village. We take a stroll through it after the interview. The shack homes areconstructed of used plastic cement bags tied to sticks. Feral dogs scamper around. Arivulet of garbage and water runs down the central dirt road.

"The money [the government] should have used to construct this road, they are usingfor personal use," Sheye says. "That is why we are bad boys."

*Not their real names.

ERIKA EICHELBERGER (/authors/erika­eichelberger) Reporter

Erika Eichelberger is a reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She has also written for TheNation, The Brooklyn Rail, and TomDispatch. Email her at eeichelberger [at] motherjones [dot] com.RSS (/RSS/AUTHORS/164486) | TWITTER (HTTP://TWITTER.COM/EICHELBERGER_E)

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98 Comments Mother Jones Login

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• Reply •

Sam • 9 months ago

A sorry state of affairs all round. I feel sorry for the desperate people they prey on, and thesorry state of the country that the scammers live in. Both are appalling in their own right.

37

• Reply •

BuddySat • 9 months ago> Sam

Yeah, I'm sure glad that doesn't happen here. 21

• Reply •

Sam • 9 months ago> BuddySat

It's a global phenomenon no doubt. And we (Americans) are no exception. 13

Guest • 9 months ago> Sam

Favorite

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• Reply •

Guest • 9 months ago> Sam

We elected Bush twice didn't we? 44

• Reply •

ohpaleasegivemeabreak • 9 months ago> Guest

No. We did NOT, actually. 94

• Reply •

Marcus_from_the_North • 9 months ago> ohpaleasegivemeabreak

That fucker wasn't even elected ONCE…

Ohhhhhh, the SCOTUS should be put in jail... 45

• Reply •

peakchoicedotorg • 9 months ago> Marcus_from_the_North

It was the Congress that appointed Bush the Lesser as President.January 6, 2001. SCOTUS merely stopped the phony counting inFlorida.

It's a quaint notion that "Presidents" are elected on election day.Control of the US government is the biggest prize in history, no waythat's going to be allowed to be determined by the voter.

Obama's "election" was also rigged, but by favorable media coverageand making sure the R's were handicapped with Palin as VP.

11

• Reply •

Earl oSatrun • 9 months ago> ohpaleasegivemeabreak

You voted, he was declared president, it's fair to say you elected him.It's not like there were any serious protesting about his being elected.

e.g. the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. :) 6

• Reply •

clemans • 9 months ago> Earl oSatrun

I protested............a lot and tried to get somebody to dosomething......the first time, I was actually told by a family member "It isjust an election, its only four years, don't worry, he will be gone in fouryears".

I said the day he was appointed that it meant we were going to war,that Americans didn't change leaders in war. And I said it would besomewhere in the Middle East, maybe Iraq again.

I don't let that family member forget, and I also don't let my republicanfriends forget that 100% of what I wrote in my essay about what wouldhappen if we went to war, has happened.

I can't say what I think about the republican members of the SupremeCourt. Legally, I probably can't. But I hope they are haunted by all ofthe faces of the lives they destroyed.

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• Reply •

Earl oSatrun • 9 months ago> clemans

I hear you. I know lots of people did protest, but you didn't riot over theissue. There wasn't any Euromaiden squares in the USA over Bush's'election', unless my memory is shot all to hell. :)

7

• Reply •

clemans • 9 months ago> Earl oSatrun

I rioted, but it was lonely out there, smiles 15

• Reply •

Tim H. • 9 months ago> clemans

Well I said many of the same things but I wasn't wise enough to writemy predictions in an essay.

2

clemans • 9 months ago> Tim H.

I take college classes and was required writing an essay, so I usedthat subject, later wrote a thesis on the Patriot Act. I just printed it outand made sure I gave a copy to my republican friends who I have

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• Reply •

dinner with nearly every week end.

It really ticked me off though......I heard one of the main bushsupporters at the other end of the table saying how he never trustedbush and how he always opposed the war.....I nearly came unglued atdinner. He tried to pass off what I had said as his own idea....untilsomeone pointed out, wasn't that what Clemans has said, so he shutup.

9

• Reply •

Tracy Hilliard • 9 months ago> clemans

9/11 I watched the towers come down and turned to my mother andsaid "They're going to bomb Iraq over this, even if it was someonefrom their own country." My mother thought I was being overdramatic.

8

• Reply •

clemans • 9 months ago> Tracy Hilliard

sometimes even a mother is wrong, smiles! 1

• Reply •

PrayerBurden • 8 months ago> clemans

I could say the same thing about Obama's "election." 1

• Reply •

clemans • 8 months ago> PrayerBurden

you can say anything you want, as long as you don't incite a riot orslander or is it libel one can't do?

• Reply •

TIM MCCLELLAN • 5 months ago> ohpaleasegivemeabreak

You ding dongs and Mother Jones are hilariously pathetic. 2

• Reply •

clemans • 9 months ago> Guest

No, we did not. He cheated in both elections, and was appointed in thefirst.

21

• Reply •

SoybeanMeal_OptionsTrader • 9 months ago> clemans

Your accusations about Bush cheating in both elections are baseless.You stated yesterday, "I don't get paid to ignore the facts".....you failedfactually on this post. MJ deduct one payment...

3

• Reply •

clemans • 9 months ago> SoybeanMeal_OptionsTrader

you must have missed the documentaries and the facts. 13

• Reply •

Aquarian_Dreamer • 9 months ago> SoybeanMeal_OptionsTrader

Nope, Ohio was most likely rigged, AIUI,and the Florida nonsense wasso widely known websites focusing on GAMING made fun of it.

11

• Reply •

Guest • 9 months ago> Aquarian_Dreamer

And let's not forget Katherine Harris 3

• Reply •

Swami_Binkinanda • 9 months ago> SoybeanMeal_OptionsTrader

Bradblog.com

• Reply •

Jeff N. • 9 months ago> Guest

Even worse ­ THEY elected Obama twice! Go figure. Guess they'rehating it now.

1

• Reply •

Tim H. • 9 months ago> BuddySat

Sarcastic much?

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• Reply •

Guest • 9 months ago> BuddySat

Ha! that's funny!

• Reply •

clemans • 9 months ago> Sam

I am glad they published this story as a reminder. If any of us know any people whomight be easy targets, we might consider sharing this story with them.

4

• Reply •

Jblxxx • 9 months ago

Do people still fall for this scam in 2014? Lol 9

• Reply •

Guest • 9 months ago> Jblxxx

It may seem laughable, but many cases of people falling for the scam are people whoare mentally ill or elderly and losing their ability to reason. I know of one case where alady was well aware of the scam, but then senility began to take over and she forgotand was taken for thousands. However I will agree that educated ..young andaverage intelligent people shouldn't be taken in this day and time...

10

• Reply •

papayaman • 9 months ago> Jblxxx

People will always fall for this. Look at how many people believe in homeopathy andastrology. It's about the same percentage of the population from generation togeneration.

5

• Reply •

30HomeGames • 9 months ago> Jblxxx

Remember online deception comes in other forms, not just money. MTV show'Catfish' based on the doco features young dupes. There have been stories lately ofSport stars exposing themselves to complete strangers once rapport was built.

4

• Reply •

JHL • 9 months ago

I was hoping for more content. Do they franchise? 14

• Reply •

Zennoby • 9 months ago> JHL

I'm sure they would take an apprentice, if you are willing to pay in advance. 18

• Reply •

30HomeGames • 9 months ago> JHL

Considering its happening in Virtual space and how clearly lucrative it is I'm surprisedthis isn't a global epidemic.

2

• Reply •

Origamimoon • 9 months ago

I sometimes write back that I am secretly the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette and that Ineed to recover my jewels and money from the French Government and ask them to sendme all their banking info and passwords. They never send them back, hmmm, I wonder why.Sometimes I correct their spelling and grammar. One guy did write back and called me a fewnice names that were spelled incorrectly. I corrected that letter and sent it back. At least hemay learn proper grammar and sentence structure. I think that karma will catch up with themone day for their dishonesty.

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• Reply •

TJ2202 • 9 months ago> Origamimoon

Check out the site "419eater" for folks that are known for their elaborate pranks onthese scammers. Some are spectacular.

7

Mister Science • 9 months ago

I've been running small email servers and dealing with the spam problem since 1994. Itseems to me the major blame lies with the consumer­facing Internet service providers. Theycould have blocked access from the Nigerian "Internet cafes" (fraud sweat shops). Theycould have staffed their abuse desks adequately, to kill the dropbox accounts fast enoughthat they're not useful. They could easily have detected the stolen accounts used to sendmost of the spam. Yahoo and MSFT, in particular, used the throwaway scammer accounts toinflate their user base and valuation. But the bean counters calculated it was cheaper to let a

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• Reply •

few hundred Americans lose their life savings every year, and the US govt didn't want tomess with Nigeria and possibly upset its oil export preferences.

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• Reply •

MonkeyD0 • 9 months ago> Mister Science

You shouldn't blame the service providers for this; the letters pre­date the Internet. Iran a mail order business in the mid 80s. We used to get Nigerian scam letters on ourFAX machine.

3

• Reply •

Mister Science • 9 months ago> MonkeyD0

You didn't have a router on your fax machine that could wall off Nigeria trafficwhile allowing the rest. You didn't have a way to discover which phonenumbers sent a high volume of scam faxes and ignore their rings. ISPs havethose tools. They're just too cheap and lazy to do anything. I ran email servicefor a few hundred people on a handful of machines and I had no trouble wallingoff Nigeria. But I couldn't get away with blocking Yahoo. These days most ofthe junk is coming from throwaway or stolen accounts on Yahoo and MSFT.(Hotmail, live.com, etc. are MSFT.) Yahoo could still do something about it, butthey won't.

6

• Reply •

9jah • 9 months ago> Mister Science

This would be VERY problematic, at least ten years ago. The internet cafes arewhere EVERYBODY including the tech geek, lay business people, and returningNigerians would go to check email or send urgent communications. Would have beena wholly unethical and impractical move.

3

• Reply •

Mister Science • 9 months ago> 9jah

It would have been and still would be the most ethical thing to do. Almost allthe network traffic from Nigeria is network abuse. Ten years ago and today.The proper thing to do with a source of chronic network abuse is disconnect it.If you can't do that, you wall off the traffic at your border router. That's theresponsibility of a network operator, to block abusive traffic, whether its spamor malware or denial of service noise. If there actually were any legitimateusers in Nigeria, there would be Internet service providers who don't allow thatactivity, and they would remain connected, and the "geeks" could use them.The oil and cocoa exploiters could bring their own satellite radios until Nigeriagot a clue and cleaned up its network. (Likewise Bulgaria. With the ratio ofabuse to legitimate traffic from there, there's no good reason for other nationsto accept .bg traffic.) It was a classic case of industrial pollution. The industrysaves a few bucks by letting it happen, and doesn't care who gets hurt.

3

• Reply •

9jah • 9 months ago> Mister Science

With all due respect, its profoundly ignorant to say almost all thenetwork traffic from Nigeria is network abuse. This is baseless. This isnot even true for the very cafe's where the scams originate.

As to internet service providers who don't allow that activity, spamfilters here in the U.S. don't universally block the e­mails, so with themyou have the same issues with potentially less sophistication.

But here for your further reference http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/... 8

• Reply •

nansaki13 • 9 months ago

sounds no worse than what corporate thieves and lobbyists pull off every day on gullibleAmericans

22

• Reply •

vito33 • 9 months ago> nansaki13

"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of thetime....."That's what politicians count on.

8

Uphill • a month ago> nansaki13

As if equivocating to give "minorities" (who actually comprise a majority of world

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• Reply •

population), softened the blow or healed the injuries of the thievery they do. Why canyou not face the bad, even when their a philosophically excused class? This is notthinking, it's not morality, it's not objective, but it is profoundly blinkered and unwise.True, what corporate thieves and lobbyists pull off on "gullible" Americans (do youreally think Americans are the most gullible among the world's populations, based ongovernance?) is very, very bad. Such people, in positions of undeserved power, whorip off, sell out and steal and lie every day, must really be brought to justice...that hasnothing to do with your predictably blase' response to criminals who exact hundredsof millions in stolen funds and the disruption of trade and the tying up ofcommunication resources world wide to the tune again of hundreds of millions ofdollars of losses...do you think their victims don't exist or are somehow sharing in theguilt of the perpetrators, the sociopaths? Oh, lots of them are black, so yes,apparently. I'd say wake up, but it's a bit late for that. These are criminals and even ifblack, should be hunted down and stopped, just like the white lobbyists you choose tomake the subject of this discussion.

• Reply •

vito33 • 9 months ago

You can take these guys down the road if you have enough time and energy. Just for fun Iused to reply to some of these scams using the same bad spelling, bad grammar, etc.:"Yes I will very well send you info for you request!!" "Very interest great in helping and how Ican help!" "What kind my infroomation?" "Me akkount? What numbr?"

Blah, blah, blah.

(You might not want to do this from your home computer.)

You can go on like this for days, and end up telling them: "Go Fuck Yourself!" It's a bit of work, but I figured it kept these assholes off somebody else's back for a while,and there's nothing more fun than scamming a scammer.

7

• Reply •

oubien • 9 months ago> vito33

I did that one time and, after a few email exchanges, they called my phone. No ideahow they got the number. Since I lived in West Africa for a while and can do apassable Nigerian accent, more hilarity ensued before they hung up. Unfortunately Inever heard from them again.

13

• Reply •

Uphill • a month ago> oubien

It's hard of course to tell if the following was real, or just a parody, but I sawseveral pages on the net dedicated to running African scammers through aringer; the anti­ scammers took advantage of the Africans' superstitions andpromised bigger and bigger payoffs to the scammers, if they would do thingslike dig pits and get multiple people to stand in the holes with things like fishand loaves of bread on their head. The anti­scammers invoked some hope/trust/ superstition in the scammers by constantly mentioning their priest'sadvice. The dialogues were quite absurd, indicating the very low intelligence fthe scammers, coupled with the most venal, grasping greed. The pictures aredefinitely Africans, not our black friends here. One can tell it's really Africa,too. One can only hope the scammers actually had the tables turned on thembecause of their own greed and stupidity. It's a riot. Search and you'll findsuch pages.

Uphill • a month ago> vito33

Yeah, it's infuriating that they have destroyed one of the most free, democraticinstitutions in trade that humanity ever had: Craigslist. And when they text and emailyou with their inane and profoundly greedy scams, a sane person just wants tothrottle them until their eyes pop out, for all the harm they've done so many...and theyare not hunted down, because it's not considered as important a priority as sending adrone to blow up one perhaps wrongly identified guy driving his car across amideastern desert. So for a while, it serves to drain off the stress by string theseidiotic lowbrow scammers, and keep them from ripping somebody else off­ at least fora while. But there's tht chance they might then focus on ruining your ads, and reallycuring into your legitimate business. So I stay away from their nonsense, except topoint out how utterly moronic they are, and offering them a very explicit andhumorously creative response. Then I block their number. Since all of them userecycling numbers (with the blessing of wireless telecom, because the scammersoffer revenue0, it's indeed hard to ever catch them. We could of course, but as I said,killing people in wars over issues we can't possibly right or even affect, to the cost of

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12/31/2014 What I Learned Hanging Out With Nigerian Email Scammers | Mother Jones

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/what­i­learned­from­nigerian­scammers 10/11

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killing people in wars over issues we can't possibly right or even affect, to the cost oftrillions and countless shattered bodies, is more profitable. Note to all the liberalideologues here; see, I'm not a conservative. Just not an idiot.

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12/31/2014 What I Learned Hanging Out With Nigerian Email Scammers | Mother Jones

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/what­i­learned­from­nigerian­scammers 11/11