Yahoo Yahoo and Cybercrime’s International Ecosystem

Nigeria is not alone in cybercrime. But among a considerable number of Nigerians, cybercrime or Yahoo Yahoo exists at the intersection of crime and means of livelihood; wrong but necessary.

Written by Adewale Oloworekende

Aug 28, 2019

On 23 August 2019, 80 Nigerians were charged with defrauding victims of up to $10 million in one of the 'largest cases of its kind in US history'. AP PHOTO / REED SAXON

On June 29, 2009, the former Nasdaq chairman and Wall Street giant, Bernard Madoff, was sentenced to 150 years in an American medium-security prison for running what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

Using the wealth management arm of his company, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, Madoff is estimated to have defrauded his victims of figures ranging from $35-65 billion. The monetary and human toll of his crime was unprecedented and even now, ten years later, the scars of his crime still exist for the victims. Despite the fallout of Madoff’s fraud and the efforts of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to stamp them out, Ponzi schemes still continue to thrive in America and, by extension, the world. And yet, curiously, there is no such thing as an American Ponzi, or a word that exists to suggest, post-Madoff, the ‘Americaness’ of Ponzi schemes.

If dictionaries or web-based knowledge sources exist to serve as repositories of humanity’s lived experiences and history, then Nigeria stands apart as one of the few countries to have a specific criminality named after it. Per these sources, there is a Nigerian scam or, more commonly, a ‘419’ scam that originates from and is fiercely identifiable to Nigeria. These scams are partly defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) online resource as:

‘combining (sic) the threat of impersonation fraud with a variation of an advance fee scheme in which a letter mailed, or e-mailed, from Nigeria offers the recipient the ‘opportunity’ to share in a percentage of millions of dollars that the author—a self-proclaimed government official—is trying to transfer illegally out of Nigeria. The recipient is encouraged to send information to the author, such as blank letterhead stationery, bank name and account numbers, and other identifying information using a fax number given in the letter or return e-mail address provided in the message. The scheme relies on convincing a willing victim, who has demonstrated a ‘propensity for larceny’ by responding to the invitation, to send money to the author of the letter in Nigeria in several instalments of increasing amounts for a variety of reasons.’

Undoubtedly, Nigeria has a problem with advance-fee scams and one that has quickly morphed into cyber-criminality; one, most of all, that continues to tarnish Nigeria’s image in the international community. However, if we remove all mention of Nigeria from the definition above and tweak the methodology of this particular advance-fee scam scenario to reflect hacking and ransomware attacks, what are we left with? Do we have a Nigerian online scamming problem or a global cybercrime issue?

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