As you said, these scams are rather elementary. Also here in Spain. It puzzles me that they are so effective.

Just some notes:
1. Blame Google Maps for me misspelling Lekki. Thanks for the correction ;)
2. I’m glad you like Cherokee. What else could I say, right? :)
3. I’m enjoying your blog. Hopefully I’ll learn something about Nigeria thanks to you.

The laws here are actually quite strict. The problem won’t go away for a few reasons, some of which (in my possibly naive opinion) are:

1. The success rate and pay-off is too darn high.I have no statistics on this, but the huge amount of ridiculously priced hi-tech devices available for purchase in some parts of this country is testament to this. Can you believe you can buy a mac-book pro for as low as ?80,000? At the current exchange rate in the parallel market, that is a little over US $460. How so? The item was most probably not bought in a legitimate manner.

2. Law enforcement has little incentive to combat this (how many people are filing lawsuits?), and also probably lacks the requisite tech-capabilities to track and bring scammers to book

You spelt “Leeki” wrongly :). It’s spelt “Lekki”. Which suggests that you’re better off ignoring these things rather than trying to sound like you can’t be fooled. In an ideal world, you would forward such an email to relevant law enforcement authorities and sleep peacefully…

Err, well, I wonder how a paying client would perpertrate a scam on e-bay so much that e-bay would place a ban on bids from Nigeria, but I am glad that companies like Amazon still ship to Nigeria instead of hiding under the mask that Nigerian’s are likely to be scammers when everyone knows what the real problems are: Credit cards are too darn insecure (I have one, and I hate the fact that credit card transactions aren’t protected with PINs) and people who fall for rather elementary scams (most of such scams are actually quite easy to identify) need a few lessons in commonsense.

Anyway, to contribute to the pool of positive information about Nigerians abroad, I would like to assure you that there are a good number of Nigerians out there who know what proxies are and who have access to remote, off-shore hosts through which to tunnel their IP traffic… so, don’t place so much faith in those GeoIP tricks. I guess what I’m trying to say is, Nigerians are not all a bunch of crooks and dimwits.

Count me as one honest Nigerian plying the tubes and who is often embarassed when Nigeria is cast in such a negative light.

[deep breath]. Feels good to let that out of my chest.

Now, I have used cherokee, and find it to be quite good. I dig the admin interface ;)

P.S. My IP address may suggest that I am in Lagos, but I actually am not. Thanks to the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, and the fact that Nigeria is a third world country, most of our internet traffic is NATed, and most of our internet access comes from public internet cafes, where you quite simply can’t conclusively judge who did what.

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Hello Michal.
You should really take notes. Don’t you remember me?
I thought we made it clear last time that you were a Nigerian scammer trying to rip me off and that I didn’t appreciate it.
Please stop wasting both our times.

PS: Are you still in the UK now and trying to get people to ship things to the manager of your store “far away west africa”? :-P
PS2: Have a nice day. Really :-)
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