Forum Moderators: buckworks
-- Ron
[edited by: lorax at 9:47 pm (utc) on April 27, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs please [/edit]
Absolutely, I do not blame an entire population for what a few do.
However, I would never, ever accept an order from that area of Africa. Just too risky. You have to understand that I am running a business to make money, not lose money. I have to feed my family, just like everybody here, we are not running a charity to help the fraudsters in Nigeria.
They have ruined it for you and I feel sorry for the honest souls in Nigeria. But it is not my problem to figure out who in Nigeria is honest.
Good luck to you.
i don't take Nigerians as fraudsters, only Nigerians placing credit card orders ............
Sorry about your loss :(
If everyone answered every 419 scam letter, it would put them out of business. They send out a million scam emails; let them weed thru a million answers LOL
You may be on to something there... There's a lot more of us than them. If we all reply, it becomes the job of the fraudsters to determine which replies to their fraudulent emails are... fraudulent.
The webmasterworld forum members alone could put a good portion of them out of business.
Of course, most of us won't take the time. DARN.
You don't see emails from the U.S. that begin "Hi, I'm Junior Corleone son of the late Vito Corleone who died in Newark leaving $56 million..."
Key question: why Nigeria (plus sometimes Ghana, Togo, Ivory Coast and environs), but almost never Bolivia, Bangladesh or Guatemala?
You may be on to something there... There's a lot more of us than them. If we all reply, it becomes the job of the fraudsters to determine which replies to their fraudulent emails are... fraudulent.
The webmasterworld forum members alone could put a good portion of them out of business.
Of course, most of us won't take the time. DARN.
Trying to get a picture and an "export fee". Unfortunately, our government does not except "export fees" with stolen credit cards.... oooops... did I say stolen credit cards.
We are asking for cash by Western Union or courier. This reverse has taken about 30 emails so far. The whole building is in on it. Lots of laughs.
Key question: why Nigeria (plus sometimes Ghana, Togo, Ivory Coast and environs), but almost never Bolivia, Bangladesh or Guatemala?
Cultural and economic reasons, I'd guess. As a fairly large former British colony with a decent education system, some money and a middle class, and recent economic and political problems, Nigeria has a large group of English-speaking young men and women with the skills and the computer access to DO the Nigerian scam. And it's the kind of thing that spreads locally. One person succeeds, others learn. Latin American countries--not enough English spoken, and there are other outlets for the criminally-inclined. Bangladesh--too poor.
Those are rough guesses and a sociologist/historian familiar with each country would need to be consulted to flesh them out, but I think the reasons are along those lines....
nigeria has long been the most corrupt country in the world. the whole society is corrupt from the top down.
apparently they export a lot of oil and should be a wealthy nation, but the people never see the money ...........
Nigeria IS the most corrupt country in the world - Romania is a close second. I run a network of classified ad sites and 99.99% of the 419 check overpayment scammers are from Nigeria.
I block the entire country now - last month I blocked 20k+ unique IP addresses that used search terms such as "classified ad for used x with email address" or "used x with *hotmail" or "used x with *yahoo.com "
They were looking for ads that included email addresses so they can bypass my messaging system and not get spotted.
Occasionally they find an anon proxy server that allows them to get through but we usually spot them pretty quickly and block the hosts (the inquires are all basically the same).
And more often now they find a new satellite provider that's not on my ban list and run rampant through the database until we detect them and shut them down.
But the attempts to access the site are getting more sophisticated. We've started to see some coming from AOL which is a serious problem for us (17% of our traffic is AOL U.S.) - we suspect that they are either dialing in to AOL via long distanced or are using VOIP to place local calls.
There's also a new twist on their scams. They will act like they are going to purchase something from a vendor and will request to pay via a wire transfer. Once they have the vendor's bank account information they disappear. Then they print up bogus checks using the firm's BIN, account number, address and phone number and start looking for an individual selling a car/boat/furniture/electronics, etc. From this point forward the scam is identical to the typical 419 check overpayment: the person cashes the check, wires the excess to either Nigeria, the UK, or a US based shipping agent and in some cases they ship the item all the while thinking they just had a "deal too good to be true."
At some point the merchant notices that a counterfeit check has cleared and the victim is out their money their item(s) and probably a lot time explaining to local law enforcement what happened.
SO. . .
DO NOT GIVE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT INFORMATION TO ANYONE OUTSIDE YOUR COUNTRY.
If you are going to do an overseas deal make them send payments via Western Union.
Bottom line is keep Nigerians and Romanians off of your site and you will cut your fraud by 99.99%.
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NIgeria is not the most corrupt country in the whole world. Some people are actually taking this personal.
Sorry! I do take this personal, absolutely!
You say that the police and the government are corrupt. What are you trying to do, make a case for dealing with Nigerians. I don't know enough about this to know who is to blame but I do know that it has been going on for years and that the Nigerian government could have done more to stop it.
If they choose not to do so I reserve the right to choose not to do business with anyone in Nigeria. These people are trying to defraud me, personally, by sending me an scam email. The fact that perhaps a million others received the same email does not minimise the intent to defraud me, personally.
Deming Headlight, a Gannett Co., Inc. newspaper
[demingheadlight.com...]
Excerpt:
"It's nationwide," Wycoff saidof the latest scam avenues, "but mostly in rural areas. They are all coming from Nigeria. They have schools. They are teaching people to do this."
Maybe you will loose a couple of thousand bucks a year by not accepting the real ones, but I am sure you will safe tens of thousands of dollars by just forwarding them to the waste basket.
There are tens of stories available about Nigerian scams on the forums. Just read them thoroughly and you will be more than convinced to ignore all request from those countries.
If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is...
Easiest solution will be to block every order that comes from countries that end on -ia OR are from Africa.
South African orders are usually okay, although I agree that at present time, African orders are not worth the effort.
They are basically all fraud attempts using stolen credit card numbers. I delete them when they arrive and do not even consider processing them.
A tip is to look at the PayPal website and see which nations they block for a complete list of nations to avoid.
You have lost the money and nothing you can do.
On another note. Many large US retailers do not ship to Canada, because they have agreements with their Canadian Divisions, not to sale in each others territory. Its more of a marketing and divisional control thing. It has nothing to do with credit card fraud. Canada's Credit card fraud is much lower than American Credit Card fraud.
Credit Card Fraud in the USA is 1% of sales.
Credit Card Fraud in Canada is 0.02% of all sales.
Credit Card Fraud in Mexico is 0.001% of all sales.
Guess which country needs to gets its act together on prosecuting credit card fraud.
Nobody asked the question, why would somebody from Nigeria scam for hubcaps. Why not electronics, or something with a higher ticket value on the black market.
why would somebody from Nigeria scam for hubcaps
Are you serious in wondering why? To put it bluntly many people in Nigeria are crooks and dishonest who will scam for anything of value, low ticket or high tickets, but low ticket items are easier to scam for.
P.S. I am sure there are missing hubcaps from many cars in Nigeria. They could also be resold in other nations or on eBay.
Credit Card Fraud in the USA is 1% of sales.
Credit Card Fraud in Canada is 0.02% of all sales.
Credit Card Fraud in Mexico is 0.001% of all sales.
Just saw a figure of .3% fraud rate for VISA in the USA. which they say is a record low for them since they started keeping records 30 years ago.
Businesses look at total profitability, not fraud rares. You betcha the CC business is highly profitable in the United States.
Credit Card Fraud in Mexico is 0.001% of all sales
Not even worth commenting on
Mexico also has the death penalty for some types of fraud!
The problem is that most scams come from Nigeria, ordering high ticket items etc. This is the group of people that WE (online merchants) generally do not like, so I don't think you should take this personal or generalise this by saying we don't like Nigerians at all. If this scam was done by Americans on such a big scale, we probably ended up blocking all orders from the U.S.
Then again, if this happened in the U.S., we would be certain that the government would do anything to avoid such scams in the future and we don't have that kind of confidence in the Nigerian government.
The problem here is that there are scammers out there from Nigeria on a big scale. It's THEIR fault most merchants no longer accept orders from Nigeria, not ours.
I never knew so many people are really that much against Nigerians so I guess the general idea is to let'em rot isn't that it?
Another thing I want to comment on the is preposterous claim that Nigeria teach citizens on how to be crooks.
That IS NOT TRUE.
PLEASE. I HELP YOU RESTORE FAITH IN THE NIGERIAN PEOPLE. I AM JESUS CHRIST, LONG LOST TWIN BROTHER OF QUEEN ELISABETH OF ENGLAND. I WAS RECENTLY KILLED IN PLANE CRASH CAR CRASH SHOT DEAD BY REBELS. WITH THE HELP OF GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS I HAVE THE SUM OF FIFTY (50) MILLION DOLLAR IN CHOCOLATE COINS. I WISH TO HELP RESTORE FAITH IN ESTEEMED NIGERIAN FRAUDSTERS
WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU IS TO PROVIDE A SAFE ACCOUNT COMPANY OR PERSONAL INTO WHICH THE FUNDS WILL BE TRANSFERRED SINCE GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS ARE NOT
ALLOWED BY OUR LAWS TO OPERATE FOREIGN ACCOUNTS. IT HAS BEEN AGREED THAT THE OWNER OF THE ACCOUNT WILL BE COMPENSATED WITH 20% OF THE REMITTED FUNDS. WE KEEP 70% WHILE 10% WILL BE SET ASIDE TO OFFSET EXPENSES AND PAY THE NECESSARY TAXES.
IF THIS PROPOSAL SATISFIES YOU, PLEASE SEND TO ME YOUR FAX AND PHONE AND YOUR BANK NUMBER AND COPY OF YOUR PASSPORT. PLEASE SNED ME $100000 DOLLAR SO I CAN OPEN NEW BANK ACCOUNT IN YOUR NAME AND AND GIVE YOUR 20% ($9 MULLION DOLLARE) INTO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT TO HELP RESTORE FAITH IN ESTEEMED NIGERIAN CROOKS
ALL MODALITIES OF THE TRANACTION HAVE BEEN WORKED OUT AND ONCE STARTED WILL NOT TAKE MORE THAN 12-14 WORKING DAYS WITH THE ABSOLUTE SUPPORT OF ALL CONCERNED. THIS TRANSACTION IS 100% RISK FREE. PLEASE TREAT AS URGENT
AND VERY CONFIDENTIAL. GOD BE WITH YOU AS I LOOK FORWARD TO YOUR REPLY.
YOURS FAITHFULLY,
JOHN SMITTH
No, not the way I feel at all. But we are not running charities here. Do you expect us to take a chance that the next order we receive from Nigeria will be legit? When we all have vast experiences with Nigerian scams.
I blame the Nigerian government (which ever General or Colonel runs the place today) for allowing this to get out of control.
For my own experience, 100% of orders placed for delivery to Nigeria, or placed by Nigerians in this country (UK) are fraudulent so even if a someone presented a genuine Nigerian order, it would be automatically rejected with the rest as the cost of checking the other 10,000 that are outright fraud makes the exercise totally worthless - I live in a free country, run my own business, and it is my choice not to do business with Nigeria or anyone associated with it.
Many Nigerians (and others) happily try to defraud me out of my money and your government is not seen to do anything about it. Don't expect me to be tolerant in this situation. Do you want me to forward copies of the emails to you? Don't complain here. Complain to your government.
