MAGAN'S WORLD:QUITE HOW delicious the revenge that American groups are exacting on Nigerian internet scammers was only brought home to me while travelling around east Africa recently. Scam-baiters are turning the tables on the scammers, luring them as far from Nigeria as possible, to the most dangerous hot spots in Africa, with promises of money.
Their trick is to reply to the fraudulent e-mails, offering money if we help smuggle funds out of Nigeria, that we’re all familiar with, and offering grants to set up a branch of an evangelical church that they claim to represent if the scammers travel to a nearby country to collect it.
In one classic example, the baiters offer a Nigerian scammer $200,000 but say he must collect it in Chad, one of the most dangerous countries in Africa. They assure him that if he buys a one-way ticket all his needs will be looked after when he arrives. They convince him not to bring any money or even a change of clothes. The only condition is that he wear a bright-pink sash and a white robe with anti-Islamic markings, so they can recognise him. Chad, being a Muslim country, is not the safest place for a Christian missionary to wear a robe emblazoned with anti-Muhammad lettering.
When he gets to N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, they e-mail him to say there’s been a delay and he needs to wait. A few days later they procrastinate further, dragging it out for three weeks while he gradually gets more desperate, living without food and sleeping rough. When he’s at his lowest ebb they send him a fake receipt as proof that the money is now waiting for him in a Western Union office 600km away, in a town called Abéché, on the road to Darfur. Their aim is to get him as far from home as possible, as the farther he goes the more alien his clothes, features and bearing will be, and the less likely anyone will be to help him.
While a white man can easily muddle his way through Africa using money and ignorance to smooth the way, Africans from other regions, tribes or faiths are treated with a little more suspicion. Despite speaking several languages, the man probably still couldn’t make himself understood in Chad.
Eventually, he manages to convince someone to drive him to Abéché with the promise of $500 when they get there, but of course there is no money awaiting him, and the poor man finds himself in even more trouble. The driver turns hostile, and at some point they encounter a rebel attack and barely escape injury. All of this is communicated back to the Americans by e-mail and posted on the baiters’ message board: “I am begging you in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, rescue us! Please come!” Each new humiliation is relished in postings such as “Knee- slappingly funny” or “He could seriously get killed; am I bad for thinking that’s pretty cool?”
In all they keep the unfortunate scammer waiting three months in Abéché, constantly thinking up new plans to frighten or humiliate him. At one point they tell him his mother has died; at another they send him a document in Arabic to hand in at the Western Union office; it reads “I am a criminal. Please arrest me. I love George Bush. I think he should invade Chad and remove this ugly country from the map.”
The scammer did eventually make it home, and he’s back sending out spam again, so before you delete the next e-mail from a Nigerian seeking help to launder money, spare a thought for the ordeal he may have been through.
- See 419eater.com.
- Manchán Magan performs his play Broken Croí/Heart Briste at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from March 15th to 20th