Nigeria cracking down on e-scams
Monday, August 8, 2005; Posted: 4:50 a.m. EDT (08:50 GMT)


LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) -- Day in, day out, a strapping, amiable 24-year-old who calls himself Kele B. heads to an Internet cafe, hunkers down at a computer and casts his net upon the cyber-waters.

Blithely oblivious to signs on the walls and desks warning of the penalties for Internet fraud, he has sent out tens of thousands of e-mails telling recipients they have won about $6.4 million in a bogus British government "Internet lottery."

"Congratulation! You Are Our Lucky Winner!" it says.

So far, Kele says, he has had only one response. But he claims it paid off handsomely. An American took the bait, he says, and coughed up "fees" and "taxes" of more than $5,000, never to hear from Kele again.

Festac Town, a district of Lagos where the scammers ply their schemes, has become notorious for "419 scams," named for the section of the Nigerian penal code that outlaws them.

In Festac Town, an entire community of scammers overnights on the Internet. By day they flaunt their smart clothes and cars and hang around the Internet cafes, trading stories about successful cons and near misses, and hatching new plots.

Festac Town is where communication specialists operating underground sell foreign telephone lines over which a scammer can purport to be calling from any city in the world. Here lurk master forgers and purveyors of such software as "e-mail extractors," which can harvest e-mail addresses by the million.

Now, however, a 3-year-old crackdown is yielding results, Nigerian authorities say.

Nuhu Ribadu, head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, says cash and assets worth more than $700 million were recovered from suspects between May 2003 and June 2004. More than 500 suspects have been arrested, more than 100 cases are before the courts and 500 others are under investigation, he said.

The agency won its first big court victory in May when Mike Amadi was sentenced to 16 years in prison for setting up a Web site that offered juicy but phoney procurement contracts. Amadi cheekily posed as Ribadu himself and used the agency's name. He was caught by an undercover agent posing as an Italian businessman.

This month the biggest international scam of all -- though not one involving the Internet -- ended in court convictions. Amaka Anajemba was sentenced to 21/2 years in prison and ordered to return $25.5 million of the $242 million she helped to steal from a Brazilian bank.

The trial of four co-defendants is to start in September.

Why Nigeria? There are many theories. The nation of 130 million, Africa's most populous, is well-educated, and English, the lingua franca of the scam industry, is the official language. Nigeria bursts with talent, from former NBA star Hakeem Olajuwon to Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka.

But with World Bank studies showing a quarter of urban college graduates are unemployed, crime offers tempting career opportunities -- in drug dealing, immigrant-trafficking, oil-smuggling and Internet fraud.

The scammers thrived during oil-rich Nigeria's 15 years of brutal and corrupt military rule, and democracy was restored only six years ago.

"We reached a point when law enforcement and regulatory agencies seemed nonexistent. But the stance of the present administration has started changing that," said Ribadu, the scam-busting chief.

President Olusegun Obasanjo is winning U.S. praise for his crackdown. Interpol, the FBI and other Western law enforcement agencies have stepped in to help, says police spokesman Emmanuel Ighodalo, and Nigerian police have received equipment and Western training in combating Internet crime and money-laundering.

Experts say Nigerian scams continue to flood e-mail systems, though many are being blocked by spam filters that get smarter and more aggressive. America Online Inc. spokesman Nicholas Graham says Nigerian messages lack the telltale signs of other spam -- like embedded Web links -- but filters are able to be alert to suspect mail coming from a specific range of Internet addresses.

Also, the scams have a limited shelf life.

In the con that Internet users are probably most familiar with, the e-mailer poses as a corrupt official looking for help in smuggling a fortune to a foreign bank account. E-mail or fax recipients are told that if they provide their banking and personal details and deposit certain sums of money, they'll get a cut of the loot.

But there are other scams, like the fake lotteries.

Kele B., who won't give his surname, says he couldn't find work after finishing high school in 2000 in the southeastern city of Owerri, so he drifted with friends to Lagos, where he tried his hand at boxing.

Then he discovered the Web.

Now he spends his mornings in Internet cafes on secondhand computers with aged screens, waiting "to see if my trap caught something," he says.

Elekwa, a chubby-faced 28-year-old who also keeps his surname to himself, shows up in Festac Town driving a Lexus and telling how he was jobless for two years despite having a diploma in computer science.

His break came four years ago when the chief of a fraud gang saw him solve what seemed like "a complex computer problem" at a business center in the southeastern city of Umuahia and lured him to Lagos.

He won't talk about his scams, only about their fruits: "Now I have three cars, I have two houses and I'm not looking for a job anymore."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/interne....ap/index.html

Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 01:27:55 -0600
Subject: Seeking for you due consent
From: "barr_davidali2006" <barr_davidali2006@terra.com.mx> Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
To:

UKA & ASSOCIATES
(LEGAL PRACTITIONERS)
67 BAKASI ROAD, SURURLE
ABA, LAGOS-NIGERIA
Goodday,
I was privileged to capture your name from the Internet. My name is Barr. David Ali, a legal practitioner and the personal Attorney to late Mr. Adams, who died along with his wife and his Two sons in a Ghastly motor accident along Egbeda road, third main-land Conway, over 3 years now August 13, 2001. All the occupants in the vehicle lost their lives. I am convinced that it was the grace of God that made me to locate you. My client was a successful and is accomplished family man, who made enough fortune before his untimely death.
Since then I had made several inquiries through your Embassy to locate any of my clients extended relative but this exercise has proved unsuccessful. After several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to trace his relatives through the Internet, to locate any member of his family not much progress was recorded My late client was an influential wealthy businessman,an oil magnet here in Nigeria and he left behind a deposit of Ten Million Two Hundred Thousand United States Dollars only US$10,2OO,OOO.OO in his domiciliary bank account in ORIENT TRUST BANK PLC here in Lagos. After the death of my client his bankers contacted me, as his Attorney to provide his next of kin who should inherit his fortune.
The board of directors of his bank adopted a resolution and I was mandated to provide his next of kin for the payment of this money within 28 working days or forfeit the money to the bank as an abandoned property.
The bankers had planned to invoke the abandoned property decree of 1996 to confiscate the funds after the expiration of the period given to me. Despairing at the point of exhaustiveness, fortunately,I came across your name, to my utmost amazement, I discovered that you bear the same surname with my late client and coincidentally, you are nationals of the same country.
I am Convinced that you may be linked with my late client or that you might provide clue to my search, I therefore, decided to contact with these facts before me because of the similarities. By virtue of my closeness to the deceased and his immediate family, I am very much aware of my client financial standing and the bank account he operates.
I have reasoned very professionally and I feel it will be legally proper to present you as the next of kin of my deceased client so that you can be paid the funds left in his bank account hence I contacted you.
I seek your consent to present you as the Next of Kin to the Deceased since you are at an advantage, so that the proceeds of this Bank Account valued at US$10.2m Million Dollars can be paid to you. We shall both share the funds. 55% to me and 45% to you, I shall assemble all the necessary Legal Documents that will be used to back up our claim. All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us seeing this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of law.Please get in touch with me by alternative email below to enable us discuss further.
barr_davidali2005@yahoo.com
Best Regards
Barr. David Ali.

I received about three of these so far. Would be nice to share in the money, but i KNOW anything too good to be true is.