Nigeria's Culture of Cybercrime

Jiri Pasovsky, a 72-year-old pensioner from the Czech Republic, walks into the Nigerian consul in the Czech capital city of Prague. This isn’t his first time here—he has been to the consul on multiple occasions to lodge the same complaint with the embassy staff: how to retrieve his lifelong savings after being conned by Nigerian internet fraudsters posing as senior officials of the Nigerian government. It’s no meagre sum but nearly $600,000. Pasovsky has heard the same glib and unsatisfactory response from the consul time and again about how the Nigerian authorities are doing their best to track down the scammers albeit with no success. Today, however, Pasovsky has had enough. He enters the consular office, and he sees the faces he now considers familiar, but unbeknownst to them, things are about to unravel. He meets the receptionist under the pretext that he is there to discuss ‘business’ and is directed to the office of embassy officer, Michael Lekara Wayid. Not long after Pasovsky walks into the office, the receptionist hears raised voices followed by gunshots. Mr Wayid has been shot. Next, Pasovsky fires at the receptionist who manages to escape with an injury to the hand. Pasovsky is eventually apprehended, but the deed is done—Mr Wayid succumbs to his wounds. He was 51 years old.

I would like to say that this was an isolated event; that the Nigerian consul tragedy sounded a wake-up call to the Nigerian government to step up the fight against cybercrime; but both would be untrue. In fact, there are several victims of Nigerian scams who go as far as committing suicide, driven by shame, debt and despair. Advanced fee fraud, as in the case of Jiri Pasovsky, is known colloquially as ‘yahoo-yahoo’ or ‘419’, after the subsection of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with fraud and obtaining property by false pretences. But how did Nigeria become globally notorious in advanced fee fraud?