High on the wall inside one of the Cyber cafés in Wuse Zone 6, Abuja, is the notice boldly typewritten on an A4 white sheet of paper. It reads:

"Dear customers. Sending of spam or 419 emails from our network is prohibited. Failure to comply with this policy, the person will be handed over to the police. Management."

This warning seems representative of the various warnings and petty legal measures taken by cyber cafes in Nigeria against possible incrimination in the perpetration of internet fraud. It is also reflective of the nature and method of perpetration of the global dimensional crime. It is expressive of the rate of prevalence of the crime in the Nigerian society and some government commitment to dealing with it.

The Internet allows individuals or companies to communicate with a large audience without spending a lot of time, effort or money. Anyone can reach tens of thousands of people by building an Internet web site, posting a message on an online bulletin board, entering a discussion in a live "chat" room or sending mass e-mails. It is easy for fraudsters to make their messages look real and credible. But it is nearly impossible for people to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

"Internet fraud" generally is a fraud scheme that uses one or more online services such as chat rooms, e-mail, message boards or Web sites to present fraudulent solicitations to prospective victims, to conduct fraudulent transactions, or to transmit the proceeds of fraud to financial institutions or to others connected with the scheme.

A most prominent form of internet scam is the Advanced Fee Fraud popularly called in Nigeria "419". Originally conducted through the post, this scam is now largely carried out by email. An urgent message arrives soliciting one's assistance in the transfer of large sums of money from Africa to safety in The West. While not all the letters come from Nigeria, the scam started there, hence the name. The term 419 refers to the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code dealing with the scamsters.

Majority of Internet scams are believed by a large section of the global society to originate from Nigeria. They take several different forms. You are promised huge sums of money from such sources as Over-Invoiced where the sender is involved with contract negotiations, has discovered a supplier has been over-invoiced and wishes to share the money with you; Imprisoned Relative where the sender has a relative who is unable to access money for some reason, such as wrongful imprisonment; and a Dead relative where the sender has a relative who has died and they can not access the money for some reason.

Other sources are: a Dead Foreigner where the sender has discovered a foreigner died with money invested somewhere, and he wants to steal it and share the money with you; Embezzlement where the sender has stolen the money and wants to share it with you; Your bank account where the sender needs help transferring money and would like to loan your bank account; Joint Venture where the sender has a business and wants to go into a joint venture with you.

Those who have been taken in have usually been asked to deposit a sum of money in order to "check the transfer route" the money then simply disappears along with the scamster. Other people have been tricked into handing over their bank details and signature, and have found their account emptied. Others have traveled to meet the perpetrator and some of these have even been kidnapped! The British Police have expressed concern that this scam is run by organised criminals, many actually based in London. Nigerian investigators believe that the government in Nigeria is well aware of the situation, but does not act, as it is mainly perpetrated by government workers and friends.

In the operation of the Scam, the target receives an unsolicited fax, text message in his or her mobile phone, email, or letter concerning Nigeria containing either a money laundering or other illegal proposal. He may also receive a legal and legitimate business proposal by normal means. Common variations on the Scam include "overinvoiced" or "double invoiced" oil or other supply and service contracts where the fraudsters want to get the overage out of Nigeria; crude oil and other commodity deals; a "bequest" left you in a will; and "money cleaning" where the scamster has a lot of currency that needs to be "chemically cleaned" before it can be used and he needs the cost of the chemicals. Or the victim will just be stiffed on a legitimate goods or services contract. The variations are very creative and virtually endless

For the fraud to work the bait is the fictional millions of dollars described in each one of these letters. The goal is to get you to come up with money for the "expenses" required to transfer those millions to you. The victim thinks a few hundred or a few thousand dollars is trivial when, for example, $41 million is at stake. Each demand for more money is claimed to be the very last obstacle before the big money is released. Sometimes, the victim is lured to Nigeria, perhaps to seal the deal, but he or she might end up plunging into a deeper danger of being defrauded more easily than he or she has ever expected.

The fraudsters get one's email address exactly the same way all spammers get it. Spammers "harvest" email addresses mentioned on web sites. Others run "dictionary attacks". That is why one gets tonnes of unsolicited commercial email even if one has kept one's own email address a secret. Spammers sell each other CD's with millions of addresses. All spam email is fraudulent.

Mallam Abubakar Abdurrahman, a resident of Abuja, said he was once about to fall victim of internet scamsters. He received a text message in his cell phone informing him that he had won money in a Chevron and Texaco competition in which he never participated. It read:

"Second edition of the ongoing Chevron Texaco bonanza. You just won 300,000 (currency not stated). Your number is one of the 15 winners. Ticket B1352K. Call us on 08055513012."

He said when he called the mobile phone number; someone attempted to pick the call, but hesitated. After some time he called again, the computer told him that the number did not even exist. He said he had received over 100 emails from internet fraudsters trying to defraud him, but he had never fallen victim.

"An internet fraudster can email you that he is a son of a Zimbabwean white farmer whose farm was confiscated by Robert Mugabe. His father was killed by the Zimbabwean authorities. Before his death, however, he had lodged a prodigious amount of money for him in a South African bank which he wants you to help him withdraw as a trustworthy person whose bank account number can be used. In the process, you get duped, because if you send them your account number they will be withdrawing money from your account." Abubakar contributed.

He said research by experts show that most of such emails emanate from Nigeria, which he was inclined to believing.

Alhaji Hassan Magaji Abubakar is an Abuja-based IT expert. "Internet fraud is a fraud organized by those we call internet fishers who connive with scammers and fraudsters. These fraudsters are those who engage in piracy and stealing intellectual property of people. They use their intellect to sell ideas to you so that they will dupe you."

According to him, "Internet fraud emanated right from the inception of internet itself because as others are trying to develop the technology in the positive way, others are trying to use it in the negative way. This gave birth to internet scam. Someone will send you an email, saying it is on behalf of a deceased President, say, the late Idi Amin of Uganda. He might say the family of Idi Amin has given him information that a huge deposit of wealth of the man was lodged in a bank, they have the document and you should help them to claim the money so that it can be shared with you, and you are entitled to such and such percentage of the money. Such things are not realistic."

Alhaji Hassan said he was once about to fall a victim. He recalled how he was saved.

"About three years ago I received an email that I have won about 45 million US Dollars in a lottery which I did not play. I wondered how they got my email and sent a certificate signed and sealed by the issuing authority that I have won that huge amount of money. I was initially very skeptical. Subsequently I decided to try them. After replying them, nothing came from them again. They only requested me to give my email address, contact address and so on and so forth, but nothing came up at all."

He said he had received over 2000 scammers' emails in his own email box, recalling that there was a Jummai Mohammed who had been sending him emails from Cote D'Ivoire that she lost her father who had a treasure where they deposited gold and other precious materials. She said the treasure is in the custody of an Insurance company somewhere, but a legal practitioner is in custody of the original copies of the relevant documents. She sent him electronic copies of the documents of inheritance and certificate of ownership of the precious materials. The documents looked genuine with stamps, even with stamps of a court of law.

The IT expert maintained that scammers seldom succeed in their pranks except in a few cases where some people fall victim, recalling that Jummai demanded him to travel to Sierra Leon to deposit some money, see their lawyer and collect the genuine documents and the materials. They will request you to pay certain registration fee and that will be the end of it all. That small token is all they want from you. You will not get anything. They will only be telling you stories until you get tired and abandon them. You can not sue them because if you do you are impliedly suing yourself and the law court will hold as an accomplice in the entire process.

He recalled coming across many people with similar complaints. "Somebody who was once the president of the Africa Youth Coalition told me that he was US-bound, because he had won 15 million US Dollars in a lottery. When I asked him if he indeed played the lottery, he said yes, and that he was even third on the list of the winners. I remember him telling me that he had a cheque of initial five million Dollars to collect and that he will later collect another installment of another ten million. They were asking for his credit card number, but I told him that if he gave them the number they will programme the credit card to be crediting their account with money, while his own account will be debited. In that way he would remain the loser. So there are scammers who will ask you to give them your credit card number which will then enable them to be withdrawing money from your account every month ,while you sit down there expecting them to send you something. They will not send you anything. He said he wanted to use the money to further his education in America. I persuaded him to follow me to the US embassy to confirm if that lottery company was existing, where their Head of Information told us it was all scam. That was the end of the story. My friend's ambition was dashed," he recalled.

He subscribed to the idea that most of the scams are perpetrated by Nigerians.

Alhaji Hassan recalled another instance on himself. "I was in Berlin when somebody sent me an email that there was vacancy in Mobil Exxon for IT personnel and that if I was interested I could apply since I was a graduate. I doubted oil companies sending such emails easily. He claimed that he was working with the American embassy in Lagos. He gave his name as Martine Bruce. He was a fake Martine Bruce. He was somebody who used Martine Bruce name and website to dupe people, because the original Martine Bruce had never been to Nigeria. When I returned to Nigeria I communicated with the US embassy to confirm if they had a staff called Martine Bruce. They told me to beware of scammers because they did not have any staff with that name. I was about to fall his victim because he asked me to send my CV and international passport. I sent the CV but discovered it was all a scam before sending the passport. I had already scanned it, but I had not sent. If I had sent it he would have used it to defraud people across the Globe, and I would eventually be arrested not him, because it is my picture that is seen, not his."

Scammers using email to persuade people to give them money or accept certain services and get duped, are a negligible number in the hacking business. Real hackers are programmers who access the data banks of big-time organizations. They can even access the data base systems of banks through the use of electronic card code, to transfer money from one account to another or even to their own accounts.

Hackers are those who always try to gain access to your system and do anything illegal with it. But there are hackers who utilize their hacking knowledge in a positive way and there are those who utilize theirs in a negative way. The big hackers are those who can gain access to data bases or any system at all and tell the system to do the contrary of what the owner has programmed to do. This is intended at telling the owner of the system that he or she has not sufficiently secured his system. So the well-intentioned hackers will lay bare before you your data base containing, say, your financial accounts everywhere, as an individual or corporate organization or even government, and then advise you to take more measures to enhance the security.

The ill-intentioned hackers will use their knowledge in the negative way by defrauding people. They gain access to your data base system, but instead of warning you of insufficient security, they ransack your financial accounts in banks and reprogramme the coding system to be crediting their own bank accounts with huge amounts of money, often at regular intervals of time, say, monthly, as your own account gets debited. They pounce more on the accounts of very wealthy individuals such as world class business moguls or corporations.

"The Nigerian government could borrow a leaf from Germany to protect hackers who apply their knowledge in the positive way, those who really want to hack big time organizations that are loose in terms of data security so that they tighten the security," Alhaji Hassan suggested, believing: "Using their talent they can assist government in its fight against internet scam. It is only those who know how to steal that can protect the property of others against thieves. Nigerian government should try to identify those who can hack positively, and those hackers who know they can help government in curtailing internet scam should readily present themselves for such job. The government should also give them protection. Those who apply their hacking knowledge in the negative way should be arrested. Those who apply it in the positive way can even help in arresting those who do so in the negative way." He said the internet is a free enterprise.

"My customers have been complaining to me that some people they suspect to be dubious have been sending them emails. They say the fraudsters mostly present themselves as brothers to some ministers, or they are wives to a late head of state of Nigeria, and that they have some money in their accounts and they are looking for trustworthy people to help them transfer the money to their personal accounts for safekeeping. I have been hearing all such things from people coming here to browse," the operator of Sedona Cyber café, who would not want his name in print, submitted.

He said whenever browsers make such complaints to him, he would always advise them to forward the case to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and they should delete the emails from their mail boxes.

He advised internet café operators to always take security and legal measures by warning browsers severely against sending 419 spam through their computers. He would not talk more.

As the government enforces all relevant laws dealing with the problem, using the EFCC and all other relevant agencies, can it trust internet hackers, as suggested by Hassan Magaji Abubakar, in the battle to save innocent Nigerians from the scamsters and launder the country's image in the global community, which believes that the larger bulk of such fraud emanates from Nigeria?