Tulio writes:
The only Nigerians I’ve met have been just normal people. I recall you saying you were in some group that fought Nigerian email scammers. Well yeah, obviously if you focused on that, you’re going to walk around with a bad impression of them. But I guarantee you that the entire nation of 170 million people isn’t sitting around writing email scams. You’re way too smart to be acting this prejudiced and irrational.
About those normal, regular Nigerians. We heard many stories about US and Canadian women (always White) who married West Africans, almost all Nigerians. They may have been what we called “marriage scammers.” In almost 100% of cases, it was a disaster.
The guy refused to work and opted to live off the woman (Sound familiar?). They cheated compulsively and continuously (Sound familiar?). Instead of looking for work, most of them would spend all their time scamming or involved in crime of some sort while the woman was off at work (Sound familiar?). They were extremely possessive, aggressive, controlling and even violent (Sound familiar?) demanded to control all aspects of the women’s lives and granted them essentially zero rights.
I knew a regular Nigerian. He had an advanced degree, worked as a physician’s assistant and was very smart. I also think he was a good man. I talked to him one day and said something like, “You know seem like a good guy, but why is your country full of liars, thieves, scammers and human scum?” Not in those words of course, and I said it very nicely in this querying, confused and mystified way like someone who just got hit over the head and was wondering what hit him.
The guy admitted that his country was the worst shithole on Earth, and he seemed depressed about it. He also said that back in ~1960, Nigeria was actually a decent and functional place with a village tribal society. This village he came from had almost no crime, but they also punished crime very severely.
With urbanization, traditional village and tribal life and mores had utterly collapsed, and an anarchic holocaust of a Hell had taken over. He had gone back there a while back and tried to do business. He and a partner invested in a medical office building of some such possibly to run a medical clinic. He went back to the US for a while, and when he went back to Nigeria, the supposedly existent medical clinic with monthly income didn’t even exist, his partner who he thought he knew really well had cleaned him out totally and vanished. He had lost tens of thousands of dollars. He acted like the country was beyond hopeless.
We were not fighting email scammers in that group. We were fighting mostly Nigerian romance scammers. A lot of people got taken because while people had heard of Nigerian email scammers, no one had heard of the romance scamming until years after they started.
The Nigerians are always changing their scams, so it is really hard to be aware of the latest one, but a good rule of thumb is that if you come across anyone with any kind of a West African connection who is talking about anything related to money, drop whatever you are doing and start running away. Most of these criminals are now pretending to be from other places like England and the US. Not sure how they are doing it, but they are routing calls out of Nigeria to make you think the call is coming from UK or whatever.
As soon as you meet anyone on the Net who has a West African connection and you don’t know them well, stop talking to them right away, block them and never talk to them again. Do not order anything from this part of the world. In my opinion, you should not have anything shipped from this part of the world either. I would be very wary about doing any sort of business with anyone from that part of the world. It sounds like a very bad idea to me.
If I am prejudiced and irrational, then that is just fine! I am ok with that. Worse, I am proud!
You act like there is a difference between “a few Nigerian scammers” and “the vast majority of the good Nigerian people.” As far as I can tell, most of the people in that part of the world are liars, thieves, scammers, criminals and morally depraved lowlifes. “West African scammer” just means “normal West African person.”
We heard that the romance scammers told everyone they knew what they were doing – parents, siblings, relatives, friends – and everyone supported their being criminals.
An 18 year old boy stole from a woman in the group (she actually got him arrested and thrown in prison), and he went out and bought an expensive car and told everyone how he got it. There was a huge crowd of fellow students, male and female swarming around the car treating him like a hero. The girls were treating him like he was Stud of the Year. They either didn’t care that he was a criminal, or they thought he was cool.
The overwhelming attitude of West Africans was that any money you could make by scamming was a good thing and a source of laughter. This is because almost all West Africans have this attitude that anyone who gets taken in any scam is an idiot who deserves to get ripped off. This is why the police never investigate these crimes either. Even the cops think it is acceptable to “rip off idiots.”
You might laugh at that rationale, but that is exactly the rationale that sociopaths have. Sociopaths think that the rest of are stupid and we deserve to get taken for being idiots. It’s not really a crime to con people because victims deserve what they get. So what you see here is that most West Africans have a moral structure that resembles the morality of a sociopath. And you have a whole part of the world where much of the population seems at least somewhat sociopathic.
So really, if they are not stealing from you, they are cheering on and laughing about those who do, which means almost all of them are scumbags if you ask me.
We also ran across stories about West Africans, mostly Nigerians, who were living in all parts of the world – the Arab world, North Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and especially Europe. Everywhere there were a significant number of these people, they were involved in cons and crime to a high degree. It’s as if crime in the national sport.
We also had a few decent Nigerians who lived in these countries, and they told us that just about everyone they knew was trying to scam Americans on the Internet. He said you would walk into an Internet cafe, and out of 40 people, 37 of them would be sitting there for hours on end trying to scam Americans in all sorts of fancy ways. One time he went into a typical cafe where 90% of the Nigerians were trying to steal from Americans, and he saw this guy who used to be a really big TV newscaster on a big Nigerian channel. Sort of a famous fellow. I guess he lost his job, and there was this famous guy, sitting there at the computer trying to steal from Americans!
And it’s not just “email scams” either. There is every ripoff and scam in the world coming out of that place. Most ships coming into Lagos Harbor are loaded with stolen goods.
A number of online stores used to accept purchases from Nigeria, but most online stores now ban 100% of IP’s out of Nigeria. Almost no one in Nigeria is trying to legitimately buy anything on the Internet. Also many credit card companies have stopped issuing credit cards to the entire populaiton of some West African countries. Whole nations are banned from having a credit card.
One guy said out of 1,000 Nigerian customers on his online stores, 999 of them were criminals using stolen credit cards. There are also many mail order scams coming out of that place, including from nearby countries. I was on a beetle forum once and a whole lot of people had been ripped off buying beetles from Africa. They have many cool beetles (except for the West Africans themselves, who in my opinion are nothing but stinkbugs) over there in Africa, and there is a lot of demand for them. Well, these African sellers were selling all of these rare and exotic beetles. I think the sellers were out of Cameroon. Not sure if they were Nigerians or not, but Cameroon is right next to Nigeria. Well, they stole a ton of money from these collectors.
I also met some Africans from other parts of the continent, including Black South Africans. A Black South African told me that Nigerians are regarded as lying, cheating, thieving crooks all over Africa and they are widely hated by their fellow Blacks, with some countries even trying to keep them from immigrating to the country.
Ebay was nearly destroyed by fake Nigerian and Gypsy sellers selling nonexistent products. Nearly 100% of the criminals were either Nigerians or Gypsies. It was getting to the point where maybe 50% of sellers were criminals.
Many social networking sites have been overwhelmed by Nigerian scammers and they have been all but destroyed. For instance, Badoo has been completely nuked by Nigerian human locusts. Almost all of the online dating sites are seriously ruined or completely destroyed by Nigerian and to a lesser extent Russian romance scammers.
There was a vast amount of rental scamming going on recently. Not sure exactly how it works. They either pretend to rent a place or pretend to be renting some place out. The room, apartment or house doesn’t even exist, and the whole thing is a ruse to drain your bank account.
Law enforcement is worthless in that part of the world. A lot of people in our group tried to get cops involved, but the police departments appeared dysfunctional, nonoperative, or run by criminals themselves.
Up to the north around Sierra Leone or wherever the gold mining is going on now, there are a whole lot of people selling gold, gold coins, gold nuggets, and gold bars. They advertise overseas. Almost 100% of these sales are scams. Barely any of them are legit in any way. You will just lose your money.
I honestly think that 50% of the population of Lagos wakes up every morning and thinks, “Who am I going to rip off today?”
