Nigeria, home to some of the world's most
notorious cyber crimes, has proposed a law making spamming a criminal
offence for which senders of unsolicited e-mails could be jailed for at
least three years.
Is this the end of an era? Nigeria is cracking down on its best-known
export - email scams - by putting a law up for vote that would finally make
these scams a criminal matter. The move is the latest by the government
there to project a tough stance on the issue - back in August, the
country even hosted a conference on how to crack down on spam.
According to this Reuters story,
spammers who are caught could face up to five years in prison, and
possibly have to give up the proceeds derived from their, uh,
entrepreneurship. But sadly, if effective (although we kinda doubt the
practice will entirely cease), it will deprive us of some of the
best - if inadvertent - humor online. On the other hand, if the Nigerian
spammer goes the way of the 20 gigabyte iPod, it could boost sales of Tuesdays with Mantu, Rich Siegel's book about his email correspondence with a Nigerian con artist, for nostalgia value alone.
The advance fee e-mail scam, known as "419" after the relevant
section of the Nigerian Criminal Code, is a computer age version of a
con game dating back hundreds of years and is sometimes called "The
Spanish Prisoner."
Typically spammers send millions of
unsolicited e-mails around the world promising recipients a share in a
fortune in return for an advance fee. Those who pay wait in vain for
the promised windfall.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has been keen
to clean Nigeria's image as a country of spammers and one of the
world's most corrupt nations since he was elected in 1999, ending 15
years of military rule in Africa's top oil producer. He set up the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in 2003 to crack down on
e-mail fraudsters who had elevated scamming to one of the country's
main foreign exchange earners after oil, natural gas and cocoa,
according to campaigners.
The anti-fraud agency is investigating hundreds of suspects and prosecuting over 50 cases involving about 100 suspects.
The
agency got its first major conviction in July when a court sentenced a
woman whose late husband masterminded the swindling of $242 million
from Brazilian Banco Noroeste S.A. between 1995 and 1998, one of the
world's biggest e-mail scams.
This is a link to one of my favorite
online videos, Ze Frank's request, in which he dramatizes a Nigerian
scam e-mail, verbatim: http://www.zefrank.com/request/
