From Willamette Week
By Matthew Korfhage
Few with email haven’t had the privilege of a Nigerian “official” requesting their assistance to transfer the sum of $47,500,000.00 (forty-seven million, five-hundred thousand United States dollars) into their bank accounts.
Despite the preposterous premise, such West African Internet fraud accounted for 7 percent of money Americans lost to e-scammers in 2010, the Internet Crime Complaint Center says—losses that total around $500 million a year.
As it turns out, most of the emails really do come from Africa. Portland native Jenna Burrell is one of the only researchers to go to Africa and meet the scammers.
In her 2012 book, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (MIT Press, 248 pages, $30), Burrell tells how she and a guide spent months during 2004 and 2010 at Internet cafes in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, persuading scammers to talk....