US government issues ultimatum to Nigeria

WE NOTICED A STORY on Computerworld which says that the US government has given the Nigerian government a deadline to limit the spamster online schemes.

According to the piece, the government has asked Nigeria to enforce its 419 criminal code, responsible for the spate of emails we and hundreds of thousands receive inviting us to help "officials" liberate money held in bank accounts.

But the Computerworld piece adds that these scams have already defrauded victims out of tens of millions of dollars. Sheesh!

The article says that the 419 Coalition Web Site estimates the scams have defrauded people out of $5 billion since 1996**. Double sheesh!

The article adds that the Nigerian government has established a fraud unit specifically aimed at the scamsters, but no one has yet spent even a night in clink for their crimes.

You can find the Computerworld story here.

And just the second we finished tapping this article in, we had a nice letter from Dr Chi Nyere, who says he'll send the INQ $28.5 million to our bank account. How kind! µ

* IN OUR STORY below, we mentioned a number of ISPs whose accounts were being used for the different varieties of scamster emails we get here at the INQ. We're pleased so say, a few ISPs have been in touch with us and we've forwarded the emails with headers to them for them to investigate further.

** IN OUR ORIGINAL story we missed out a vital few words, which is that the 419 Coalition Web site "estimates the scams have" -- apologies for this SNAFU and to the 419 web site for the mess, now fixed.

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