Crime and especially violent crime is sky-high in most Sub Saharan African countries by both self-report from those who live there, from traveler reports (you can go read many reports from travelers to Africa reporting frightening out of control crime), from official government reports (many of those countries have traveler warnings issued by the state department for very high crime rates, and also by simple observation.
We dealt a lot with Nigerian scammers, and they were almost never arrested and never went to prison. Whole Internet cafes are taken over by scammers. One Nigerian man who worked with us said the average cafe in Lagos contained 90% scammer criminals in the daytime and late at night. Only 10% of people there during normal working hours were noncriminals. Cafe scammers were usually young, but there were older ones too. Our Nigerian contact was stunned to see a former newscaster for a large Lagos TV station sitting in there trying to scam Americans.
Authorities refused to do anything about it. Part of the problem with the scamming is that the society is so depraved that the police do not even feel that scamming is a crime or should be against the law. They refuse to arrest scammers because the cops have the sociopathic type mindset that scamming victims deserve to be fleeced for being stupid. We were told that most cops in Nigeria and Ghana were criminals themselves. In Accra, cops regularly set up roadblocks and shake down every motorist trying to get by. You have to bribe them to keep going on the road.
We had reports that said most of the scammers had excellent relations with their families, including their parents. Their parents knew that their sons were criminals, but they did not care and they actually considered this a great way to make money. That’s how depraved and evil even the so-called normal people are.
Law enforcement is nearly nonexistent in many of these lands, so it appears that many to most crimes are not even reported. This means the crime rate may be far higher than what is reported. Apparently most crimes in the region go unsolved, so criminals feel they have a sense of impunity. In Lagos, purse-snatchers and pickpockets are sometimes apprehended in the act by people in the nearby crowds. A mob captures the thief and abuses him in public on the street. In many cases, the thief is murdered by lynch mob justice right there on the street. The thieves are frequently set on fire and burned to death in public. Sure the cops don’t enforce the law, but vigilantes and mobs just might.
Most of the dating sites have been destroyed by Nigerian criminals. We ran a Yahoo group to fight dating scammers. Many Nigerians came to the group saying that they were regular Nigerians who were outraged by the scammers who were giving the nation a bad reputation. They did not seem like typical scammers. They cooperated with us for a while, but after some time, ~95% of them tried to steal from us and were thrown out of the group.
Also the Nigerian men were all harassing the White women in the group on chat. They were always asking to cam chat with the women. The women would turn on their cams to see the Nigerian, and the Nigerian would have his dick out jerking off at the women. Some of the women in our group were traumatized by that, and after a while, we started throwing them out for jerking off at the women. Almost all of them jerked off at our women on cam.
Also a lot of the men were trying to get a Western, preferably White, wife. We called them “marriage scammers,” and after a while, we started throwing them all out too.
We received many reports from women who had married Nigerian men and got them into the US or Canada. The men marry the women for a VISA. Almost 100% of the men were criminals who refused to work and lived off the women. They all habitually cheated on their wives, and most of them stayed home all day chatting with women on the Net to get new lovers or else running scams and other crimes from the computer.
These men were also domineering, abusive and severely restricted their wives’ freedom.
Apparently this is how marriage works in ultra-patriarchal Nigeria. A number of West African women we got to know said the place was crap because women were treated like dirt in the region by West African men. One of the women who told us this was from Sierra Leone, so this indicates the problem is regional. The Sierre Leone woman was later thrown out when she tried to steal from us.
Many of the Net auction sites were also ruined by Nigerians and Gypsies. The online housing rental business was seriously ruined. Almost anyone offering to sell anything from West Africa on the Net (West Africans are often selling things like gold on the Net) is a criminal. There was a large case recently where Nigerians in Cameroon ripped off many bug collectors by offering to sell rare beetles which are much sought after by collectors. They stole from all the collectors.
One man with an online store said he had 10,000 buy attempts from Nigeria, and 100% were fraudulent, all using stolen credit cards. Many online retailers ban all IP’s from Nigeria from their stores and do not accept any credit card transactions from a Nigerian IP because it is almost always using a stolen credit card. Finally major credit card companies banned the use of their cards to Nigerians. Nigerians cannot get a number of major credit cards due to their nationality. Later some other West African nations were also banned by major credit cards. Ghanians complained that they could not get credit cards either.
We have reports that many of the ships coming into Nigerian harbors are full of stolen goods, possibly up to 50% of all ship imports. Many non-contraband items not stolen are offloaded at the docks and then promptly stolen either at the dock or en route to wherever they are taken to be retailed.
We got to know some Nigerians who had money, and they told us that they ran off generators. Nigeria is extremely oil rich, but the power goes out constantly in Lagos. The reason is because the people who run the power companies are criminals, and they steal most of the oil that is meant to power the city to sell it on the black market. This is what our Nigerian informants told us.
An anti-fraud commission was set up in Nigeria, and they had to head it with a Muslim from the north. The position went empty for a long time because they literally could not find anyone in the Nigerian government who was not a criminal! Finally they found that one man, and he was the only noncriminal official in the government. He had a hard time prosecuting cases because he received constant threats from criminals and government officials who were either criminals themselves or were in league with organized crime.
The US FBI closed down its Nigerian offices where it had been working with the Nigerian government on organized crime due to “complete lack of cooperation from the Nigerian government.” In other words, most everyone in the government was a criminal and was also in with the organized crime gangs.
We got to know some Nigerians when some people in the group made friends with them. We were told that all Nigerians do not trust anyone at all and they all worry that anyone, including their own friends, might rip them off at any time.
Major oil companies had offices in Nigeria to house Western employees. They put up huge electric fences with barbed wire to keep the criminals out. Also they put in strict rules to try to keep employees from going out into society because it was too dangerous.
Nigerian roads are chaotic and horrible and there are terrible accidents causing injury and death all the time. Typically there is a horrible accident with injuries and death. Other motorists along the road will pull over, and a crowd will descend on the wreckage to rob the wounded. They also steal anything they can from the dead.
Human beings are regularly kidnapped by witch doctors in Nigeria where they sacrificed via ritual murder in order to cast magic spells. The witch doctors also chop the victims up after they die and use the various body organs in magic spells. There is a high demand for these body parts among witch doctors.
We got to know some Westerners who went to Lagos. One woman told us that as soon as she got off the plane, she went to the restroom, and a Nigerian woman immediately tried to steal from her! She had barely been in the country 10 minutes before someone tried to rob her. She said there were also reports that the guards and people checking your bags were thieves. She said when the plane landed you could smell the overwhelming smell of rotting garbage. That is the smell of Lagos, the overwhelming, retching smell of rotting garbage, she told us.