libertine81 wrote:
What numbers are we referring to here? Can you give me a conservative ballpark figure, and not the percentage, of the amount of Nigerian scammers you’ve encountered? If what I read from this article turns out to be true, then it would be pretty shocking.
The only Nigerian that I have met in my life was decent and honest. I detected no criminal-like behavior in him at all.
The US Embassy in Lagos is not stupid. They know that is a nation full of lousy people, and many of them are either crooks or scumbags. They turn down at least 99% of Nigerians who try to get into the US. It is very hard to get into the US from Nigeria. We kept getting told this.
The ones they do let in often have an advanced degree. I met two Nigerians, and they were both PA’s with advanced degrees. A Nigerian professional with an advanced degree is likely to be a good person.
I personally dealt with literally hundreds of these scammer idiots. The Internet cafe owners were all in on it. You could walk into 10-20 Internet cafes in Lagos on any given day, and 80% of the people in there would be sitting there scamming Americans all day long. There was a bit of a crackdown, and then the cafe owners pretended to kick the scammers out, but they would just open the cafes at nigh,t and the cafe would fill up with scammers who would stay in there all night long. They would leave in the morning.
We kept trying to get the Nigerian police to do something about it, but they refused to get involved. It used to make us furious that the cops would not do anything about it. The cops all acted like they could care less, and they thought there was nothing wrong with it. Their attitude was, “Why would anyone be so stupid as to fall for something as lame as that anyway?” They had this attitude that it was ok to con fools. The cops were sleazy.
One woman managed to get an idiot arrested. He stole $50,000 from her, and he got nailed with ~6 years in prison. He spent the money on a brand new fancy Mercedes, he drove it to the college where he went to school, and everyone came out and oohed and ahhed at it. The whole crowd knew he stole the money, but none of them even cared.
We were told that the scammers were mostly teenage boys and young men. A lot were working on their own, but some were working for organized crime gangs. There were also some other scammers who were older men. They looked very hard and cold, and they were very, very good. Very slick and smooth. Those were like hardcore criminals, gangsters.
A lot of younger guys were often not very good scammers. A lot of the young guys did not look hard and cold. They just seemed like idiots and assholes.
We got photographs of a lot of the scammers. A lot of the young guys and even some of the hard, cold older ones.
After a while they got some young women in on it too. You would call to talk to your beautiful fake woman, and one of the women would answer the phone.
We were told that the young guys could make some very good money off the romance scamming, sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars. They would go home, tell their family about it, and their mother, father and siblings would all cheer for them. It was like literally not one human in Lagos cared that these guys were stealing money from Americans.
After a while I started thinking there was something very badly wrong with these people from this country. I do not know what happened to that country, but something went horribly wrong there, and it ended up creating a nation of criminals.
