In Nigeria, this does little to deter more Nigerian men from involvement in what has been revealed as a widening network of global cyber fraud.
When Nigerians first attained notoriety in the 1990s for defrauding Westerners of millions of dollars, the scams became known as 419 after the section of the Nigerian penal code which tackles such crimes.
Nigerians, who are generally religious, also linked the aptness of this number to the Book of Psalms, chapter 41 and verse 9 (41:9), which seems to describe the typical advance fee fraud: “Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted his heel against me.”
These days, the scams, which are conducted mostly online, via email and messaging apps, are often referred to as Yahoo Yahoo.
They are usually romance scams, or phishing, which FBI special agent Michael Nail once referred to as “modern-day bank robbery”.
“You can sit at home in your PJs and slippers with a laptop, and you can rob a bank,” he said.
Written By Adeluwoye Comfort Eniola Obinwannem News
