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Africa’s Leading City of Cyber Crime

You are very busy trying to cope up with the myriad of your daily tasks fighting really hard to beat deadlines, suddenly an email comes to your inbox, so you pose a little to have a glance at it, you might have finally got your long awaited response from your prospects, so you are quick to check the content of your new mail, alas it is not the prospect but equally richly convincing email from un known person who has just offered you millions of dollars in fortune, now I can see you are smiling, left your daily tasks and has now started to respond to your new luck. Well you seem to have now believed in miracles, little did you know that the Email must have simply came from some where in Lagos and is a Nigerian spam The chaotic and crumbling Nigerian city is widely considered the world's leading location for Internet-based scam.
“The man” was once a millionaire. He was self-employed and spent almost two decades living in such exotic foreign countries as Yemen. He thought he knew his way around the world; that he would never lose control, never fall victim to a scam. But he was -- fleeced for 600,000 euros over the Internet. Now he sits in an office in Lagos, fighting back tears and self-pity, saying: "This is all so embarrassing." Cliff is just one of the thousands of people fleeced every day with sweet induced emails from Nigeria. Most of us believe that it will be hard to convince us through a simple email, what we forget to understand is that, we have conscious and our minds can always be easily infiltrated by these messages that we end up loosing huge chunks of money without noticing until the actual lose.
 
It is estimated that Nigerian spam today forms a quarter of all the total junk Emails sent across the Internet. In Nigeria the scam is a well-organized network syndicate with highly guarded offices and employees earning salary through the scam. Internet fraud of this type in Nigeria is called "four-one-nine" crime (419), after the relevant section of the country's criminal code. A 419 is a mass crime, a money generator, and could aptly be described as the use of globalized methods as revenge by the losers of globalization. Their weapon is the Internet.
The most pernicious element of such fraud is its simplicity. The scammers send letters and e-mails to strangers, asking for help. In most cases, they know nothing more about their potential victims than their addresses. The letters always follow the same basic formula: A fortune worth several and sometimes as much as hundreds of millions of dollars needs to be moved from continent to continent and unfortunate events prevents the owners of the money from doing so. This, according to the letters, is the reason the recipients have been contacted. Their assistance will, of course, be handsomely rewarded when part of the fortune is transferred into the recipient's account.

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