26 Feb 2009 |
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A couple of days ago, the British broadsheet, The Independent, published a report of how emails were sent to the constituents of British senior politician and Justice Secretary, Jack Straw. Straw was said to have been stranded in Lagos, Nigeria, having misplaced “my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money and other valuable things were kept.” Straw was supposed to have continued the SOS, "I would like you to assist me with a soft loan urgently to settle my hotel bills and get myself back home." A few weeks ago the friends of the Nigerian journalist, Rueben Abati, had received mails in similar vein, something to do with his daughter being ill and he needing some money to get her treatment while he was tied up abroad. The illiterate syntax of the emails should even have shown up the correspondence as a scam even if Abati did not try to confute it. I, like millions of people all over the world, receive such mails too. Although I have almost been seduced into trying to open a line a communication between me and some of the senders of the scam mails, play the sort of Socratic games some people play with them, show them up for the braindead fools they are, I often delete the mails. Except for the purpose of self-indulgence, I have nothing to add to the huge corpus scambaiting literature on the internet and even in hard text. Then the scammers had somehow wiled their way into Jack Straw’s hotmail account, a minor account he used to communicate with his constituents, which was where they were able to get the addresses of his constituents and send out the scam mails. Again this time the scammers had misfired. However much the love and admiration Straw’s constituents may have had for him, I wonder whether any of them would jump at sending $3000 to him in Lagos. Of course most of them could see through the intended scam, an unimaginative maggot if ever there was any. Some of the constituents were concerned enough to call Straw’s office, anyway. And one of those less partial to Straw – possibly a member of the other party – had told reporters that Straw might just as well be left to stew in the heat of Lagos. As Home Secretary, Jack Straw established the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit to combat internet hackers, and one of the targets of the crime unit was the Nigerian rather rangy internet fraudsters. He’d commented after he discovered he’d been targeted, “But I think it was so obviously ridiculous that I could go off trekking in Africa and I would lose my wallet." Anyway, the Straw email booby was even perhaps more harebrained than the Abati phishing farce. So I really don’t think it is worth anyone’s time enumerating the idiocies inherent in the scheme, the non-sequiturs, the jejune hopelessness of it. For some time now, I have braced my mind for exposures of such brazen card-house of hooey from fraudsters often described as ‘Nigerian.’ It is a surprise one of a quarter-of-a-million people still fall for the gormless setups – but they do. Strange. Human credulity or greed – I wonder which should carry the can. I read some of the comments under the article of the phishers’ attempt to blindside Straw’s constituents. The majority was on the droll side, the laughable brass the wannabe fraudsters had. But there was a lone voice, Nigerian in all probability, he’d asked the question: How could anyone be sure that the senders of the dumb mail were Nigerians, it was unlikely that Nigerian internet 419ers would know who the British Justice was, anyway? As a Nigerian-born person, and against the set judgement of most earthlings, you really want to disabuse yourself, you want to believe that there is a conspiracy somewhere, that some faceless people from other countries of the world have ganged up against your dear land, hellbent on sullying the great country’s image. How indeed would the patently incurrent Nigerian fraudsters know the name of the British Justice Minister, haven’t they always proved themselves sidesplittingly analphabetic? Even then, isn’t Jack Straw something like John Doe, or Jane Doe, the name given the nameless, or more accurately a man stuffed with straw, an effigy? Even if the provenance of the mail was Nigerian, I can see a world-class lawyer – like the commenter, say, if he was a lawyer – proving to the world that the senders of the mail had been playing mind-game with the people from Blackburn constituency in England, that the Jack Straw they said was stranded, skint, in Lagos was a nonperson, a nonentity, a straw-filled imaginary person, a man of straw rather than a man of substance like the minister. Then haven’t you received letters purportedly sent from Ghana, South Africa, Togo, even England and the US, phishers with strange un-Nigerian names? Or can they all be Nigerians? Maybe Nigerians have become jinns and gremlins, viruses and trojan horses, in everyone’s computers, churning out the tasteless, if crooked, mails. And the catchphrase: Nigerian scam, hasn’t this become like Greek or Indian Gift. Oh, beware of Nigerians bearing gifts through the internet! That seems to be the rallying-cry in the global war against Nigeria now. Truly, we must fight this assault on Nigeria and Nigerians. We must prove to the world that we are a country of straightforward, greedless people, that the term 419 is now meaningless in our country, every 419 fraudster having been locked up and imprisoned by the Big Sweep that was Obasanjo's government, the Sweep that was passed to Yar Adua’s firm hand. Let us begin a campaign to scour Nigeria’s image clean… Or have I only been indulging in a strawman self-argument?
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