How many of them are there?

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Hello I'm New here! Joined: 08 Aug 2006 Posts: 13

Seriously, how many people actually engage in trying to scam people? A few dozen? A few hundred? A few thousand?
Do you ever suspect that you are baiting the same lad on a different scam?

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 11:00 am

Considering urgentmessage.org lists 56743 scam emails, and they don't have them all (none of the ones I'm baiting) I should think it's a cast of thousands, and some lads probably have dozens of email addies Wink

Not quite a Newb Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 41

They are legion.

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 1:59 pm

Perhaps a year ago I read a comment by a Nigerian official, who was attempting to downplay the extent of scammer activity in Nigeria. He said that only one to two percent of the Nigerian population was involved in scamming. The population of Nigeria is about 130 million, so 1.5% is just under 2 million. And that's just Nigeria. To that must be added Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, South Africa, and many other countries, some of which in Europe and elsewhere.

So the answer is: several millions. There are many innocents in those countries, but many, many scammers as well.

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 3:33 pm

pilgrim wrote:

Perhaps a year ago I read a comment by a Nigerian official, who was attempting to downplay the extent of scammer activity in Nigeria. He said that only one to two percent of the Nigerian population was involved in scamming.

Talking about percents, there was interesting little information in J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill's book "The Human Web. A Bird's-Eye View of World History" about Nigeria and Internet. The following quote can be somehat wrong, as I'm translating it to English, but percentages are as they were presented in the book.

Quote:

In the year 2000 60% of the people of the United States used Internet on regular basis and of South Koreans about 35%. In Brasil, however, only 6% were users of Internet and in Nigeria less than 0,1% of the population.

Well, how accurate is that? Difficult to say, as it really wasn't a book about the Internet use in Nigeria, not to mention that this statistic is now seven years old. Still, I thought it was interesting and somewhat relevant to the topic.

As for how many there are currently, the answer is simple: too many. Back to baiting.

-Cyric

Edit: And of course I'm not saying that all people of that 0,1% are scammers. It's the low percent that I found interesting.

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 4:10 pm

I am probably going to get bitch slapped for this but in my experience, darn near everyone in West Africa who has access to the Internet tries to scam. 419 is totally accepted there. It is practically celebrated. How many people is that? Not sure.

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