By Vincent Safuto staff writer
May 3, 2003
A common complaint is that Americans are mostly ignorant about geography, and that we don't know much about other countries and only become interested when we're mad at them or at war with them.
One country, though, has become well known in America, but not for the reasons mentioned above.
Nigeria is a major topic of conversation for Americans who retrieve their e-mail, because of the infamous scam that started before the Internet became a big deal and has spread to other countries.
Nigeria does have a major export that doesn't land in your e-mail: oil. There's also a lot of political corruption, and economic disarray that has turned sending junk e-mails promising big bucks into a family industry.
You might say that the family that spams together stays together.
An article in the July 2002 issue of Wired magazine told the story of "Taiwo," an articulate and crafty young student who wrote "URGENT BUSINESS PROPOSALS" for eight years.
His family has been sending out such letters for 15 years, and the profits from the money-transfer scam enterprise have enabled them to live well.
"Taiwo" is no longer in the family business, though, which hasn't stunted the creativity of his fellow Nigerians.
Indeed, what is striking about the letters is their excruciating formality and soap-opera style, which "Taiwo" said was deliberate and meant to impress recipients that the person sending the letter was a high-ranking person above the masses of people in Nigeria.
But that exaggerated style is what gives it away, I think, as a fraud. Most spam e-mails for printer ink, Viagra or other "extension" services and weight loss are very informal.
The excessive formality in e-mail is almost mocking, in a way. The closest comparison I know if is the occasional telemarketer who affects a British accent in an effort to sound like he or she is anything but a cubicle-dweller in a cyber-sweatshop somewhere in the Midwest.
One of my favorite telemarketing calls of all time was a woman who greeted me by letting out several hacking coughs, then began her pitch in the finest BBC accent.
Since many Americans associated a British accent with honesty, integrity and class, it's easy to see why so many telemarketers try that mode of speech.
And it's easy to see why Nigerians view the money transfer as a ticket out of their economically desperate lives. Any spammer will admit that all it takes is one bite on an e-mail to pay the costs and leave a tidy profit of tens of millions of e-mails.
All a Nigerian has to do is convince one gullible American a year that he'll get "12 MILLION, THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS U.S." and wait for the bank account number and cash to roll in.
Not surprisingly, the Nigerian government, which can barely do anything, hasn't done much about the e-mail scams. For now, all anyone can do is just keep that delete button finger limber, and beware of strange e-mails bearing business proposals.
Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).
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