Saturday, November 7, 2009

The 'benevolent' Nigerians !


I keep getting e-mail messages from some strange people who happen to be Nigerians. The contents of the messages do not differ much from each other. They all say that there is a large fortune ( running into several hundred thousands of dollars) left behind by some one who has passed away or has been killed and there are no known inheritors. The senders of the mails who claim to have the said-fortune in their custody want to get it out of their country with my help (or your help if you too have received such mails). In return they are willing to pass on a hefty 30 % of the loot . They ask me for my bank account details. They ask me for my telephone number. Having come into this world several decades ago and having heard of the Nigerian racket many times, I junk such mails into the recycle bin immediately. But if you are a curious person who has never heard of this special brand of Nigerian scam, you will let them know your telephone number. Soon you will get a call and the caller would inform you about a small hitch in his pious plans of rewarding you. He has corrupt officials in his country to bribe off so that they do not play spoilers. So the caller would want you to pay some 4000 to 5000 dollars to him which he promises to return to you along with the 30% share of yours. Now there will be a battle between greed and commonsense before you decide to act. You will either laugh it away and forget all about it. Or, your greed will actually make you end up parting with your hard-earned money in expectation of the promised windfall. While it might appear too silly to think that any one could fall in this kind of deceivers' net, facts speak otherwise. There are several Indians who have fallen for this and ended up losing money. I read one such case every two months in newspapers. The people who get deceived are not uneducated men or innocent home-bound housewives. Many of them are in good jobs or run their own businesses. They do not question themselves what is so special about them that makes some foreigner decide to seek their help even if there really is some such fortune waiting to be claimed in a far-away land. The con men send hundreds of mails betting on the statistical average of the gullible and the greedy in the population. The police keep cautioning the public routinely; but the human greed for unearned wealth is so huge that the Nigerian tricksters will continue to thrive. Many of those Nigerians are students in Indian Universities. What puzzles me is why these Nigerians have such luck with Indians alone. Or. are they trying it successfully elsewhere too? Also, why do only Nigerians specialise in this particular brand of cheating? Why have the Kenyans or Tanzanians or Ugandans left this lucrative field free for the Nigerians? After all, there are a lot of students from these countries as well in the Indian Universities.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

they do send such mails also to europe.I got mails with same content 2 years ago .when I investigated on net I found many stories from ppl who were cheated by them.....sonja

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