Looks like the Nigerian scammers are branching out and heading all over the world to do their scams. And now they are nailing people in Australia too. They have nailed many people in the US and some in the UK, France and Germany.
A real problem is that they have seriously infested nearly all of the dating sites. I know that Hotornot has been taken over completely. Any new dating site is soon swarmed with them. On some sites, up to 90% of the profiles are fakes.
The sites are almost complicit because they refuse to police their sites for scammers to the point where they will not even remove the profiles of known scammers. They think it is a waste of money to protect their customers from criminals and their attitude towards profiles is the more the better. This is the rationale behind allowing the sites to fill up with criminal, fraudulent, or inactive profiles. Even if half the profiles are crooks are dormant, they still get to say, “4 million profiles.” Online dating is a phenomenally sleazy business.
It is often not so easy to tell the fakes from the real people on these sites, although we have gotten pretty good at it down through the years. In 2005, a woman and I set up a Yahoo group to try to catch the scammers. Another group called Romancescams sprung up at the same time.
Over the years, I have met many people who have been victimized by these people, men and women of all ages. A number of them were quite cautious and thought they had gone through all the checks, but when some beautiful woman tells you she loves you, it’s hard to resist. A lot of victims are depressed and suicidal. I and others have worked with and counseled many of the victims. We used to do this all the time, so I am pretty sympathetic to the victims though I suppose most would just say that they are idiots.
Not everyone turns over their life savings. Others paid the people ~$50/month for years. Doesn’t seem like a lot, but it adds up to $2-4,000 over a period of years. Now with Tineye and reverse image search it is a lot of easier to catch their fake photos. We can also often tell by the way they write their profiles who they are.
In some ways, they are utterly brilliant, but in other ways, they are dumb as rocks. In Nigeria, it is a whole vast industry. In quite a few of the Internet cafes, you will walk in there and maybe 90% of the people are sitting there for hours on end doing nothing but trying to steal from Americans.
There are many other variations on the scam. The Nigerians also took over eBay auctions with a variety of scams and nearly ruined those too. A very large number of Gypsies were also involved in the eBay scams.
Even if you have no sympathy for the marks, I would think that one would be concerned that entire online industries and huge sites like eBay have been destroyed by criminals. I find that pretty infuriating.
It really does seem like nothing good comes out of Nigeria. One online retailer said he had had thousands of orders from Nigeria, but not even one of them had been legit. Many online sellers simply block all IP’s coming out of Nigeria. There is so much theft coming out of these nations that large credit card companies have cut off entire West African nations from being able to get credit cards. In Nigeria and Ghana but especially Nigeria, the police do little or nothing to try to catch the scammers and often they are in with them. The police do not seem to think this is a crime worth investigating.
A number of Western women have married Nigerian men they met online. In every case I heard of, it did not work out. The men sit at home all day while the women work to support them. They get high, drink, and sit in front of the computer all day trying to scam people. They live off the women and refuse to work. They are extremely jealous and control the lives of the women tightly. And they all habitually cheat on their wives. 99.5% of Visa applications from Nigeria are denied by the US Embassy. This is the way it has to be.