Identity Theft, Credit Card Fraud, and Broken Hearts

Nigeria and Ghana are doing pretty well when it comes to technology. The phishing emails coming from these countries have made scams from Nigeria and Ghana rather notorious in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Never mind the dirt roads or the people of Ghana selling bags of water at every stop light, because by African standards, this scenario is already quite good. One should also not mind the huge amount of foreign aid going into the country that has always failed to trickle down to its masses because the aid is not helping those who need that money. Blame it on corruption, they say, but like in every environment, survival of the fittest applies.

People from Ghana, due to widespread poverty, have resorted to extracting money from foreigners they meet online. This has been going on for years with the Nigerians leading the way by selling puppies to folks in the United States and Canada and asking these people to send them a certain amount of money through Western Union.

This gave birth to the joke that has been running for years that if a seller requires you to pay through Western Union, it is probably a scam.

Although the puppy scam does not touch the realms of identity theft or credit card fraud, those who participate in this fraudulent activity have had the foresight to branch out. Phishing emails from supposed bank managers in the UK and government agencies have been attacking email users for years asking about personal details.

This, according to experts, is where identity theft comes in to play since the people who send these messages also ask about the recipients’ bank information. Numerous calls to the likes of Bank of America have been made by Nigerians and Ghanaians through the years. The question is, how it was done without spending money?

Reports say that these calls were routed to free call services in the US that used American operators to leave messages. These “local calls” were made through a US-based website that the Nigerian and Ghanaian scammers go to.

Apparently, the scammers only have to mask their IP addresses and make it appear as a US IP address to be able to make these calls.

Once they make the call, scammers from these parts of Africa pretend to be the owner of certain bank accounts, the details of which were gathered from their phishing emails. Credit card theft is also very prevalent since such details can also be extracted from the recipient of the emails, provided of course that the recipient unfortunately messages them back.

The New "I Love You" Scam

Another scam that is thought to be Ghanaian in origin is making lonely foreign women fall in love while the Ghanaian scammer tells these women how hard life is in Ghana. It has been reported that women from the United States have been targeted by Ghanaian scammers, and many of these women have sent money and gifts to Ghana.

The scams have now become very elaborate and have broken quite a few hearts.

It's never safe to assume that people are who they say they are online. Scammers have been swindling victims online since the inception of the public Internet. Now with Ghana joining Nigeria in the massive identity theft and fraud circle, users need to be even more vigilant about keeping themselves safe online.