As a Nigeria-American, nothing is more irritating and embarrassing
as the high number of bogus e-mails that I get from dubious folks back home in Nigeria.
On daily basis, I’m reduced to a potential victim or Mugun (as
victims are called) of the Nigerian scam artists a.k.a 419, a.k.a yahoo-yahoo, a.k.a
smooth operators, a.k.a romance artists, a.k.a dealing dealers. I get to know this
by periodically going through the high volumes of unscrupulous mails that are automatically
filtered into my yahoo box spam page.
If the shameless bastards are not pretending to be the
United Nations Secretary General offering me some grants that I didn’t apply
for, they are masquerading as Santa Claus with loads of Dollars as inheritance
left by their parents in a Nigerian bank account that they want to share with
me.
If only they knew that the e-mail address belonged to me (a fellow
Nigerian) I guess they would not have been wasting their time and energy
sending the silly mails to me. But most times, they only “harvest” e-mail
addresses from the cyberspace without the accompanying names.
With only some laptops and just a little space in their
living rooms, these young men and women commit all sorts of criminal atrocities
across the world. In the process, they wreak financial, emotional and physical
havoc on their victims.
The situation has now reached such a despicable point where
certain websites such as Craiglist, E-bay and Match.com (to mention just a few)
bluntly advise visitors on their sites to beware of nefarious sales pitches and
romantic proposals from Nigerians. In some cases, some of these websites
actually restrict visits by anyone from Nigeria.
And the victims (in spite of their "contributive" negligence and
no thanks to their greedy, gullible nature) often turn around to blame and
stereotype all Nigerians at home and abroad.
Talking of stereotypes, I used to only hear horror tales
from fellow Nigeria-Americans who suffered terrible embarrassments at their jobs--banks
(especially credit card banks), insurance companies, retail stores and other
sensitive places of employments. One could only sympathize with them. And then I
had my own personal experience.
During a meeting at my job one day, a very mischievous officer
turned to me and asked (tongue in cheek).
“Hey boss, aren’t you from that country where scam artists
send crazy e-mails to rip off innocent people?”
I glared silently at him for a brief moment and decided to
ignore him. But the damage was done.
Shortly after, a top brass casually asked where
I came from originally.
"Nigeria." I answered with all the confidence I could muster.
"Really...uh...cool." he nodded.
.
Yeah right!
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