Nigerian Sextortion Scams an International Disaster, Says Justice Official
By Ebere Inyama
(Anambra) The government of Anambra state has washed its hands off the case involving the newly elected chairman of Ogbaru LGA (County), Franklin Nwadialo, who was arrested in the U.S. State of Texas, November 5 allegedly for running a $3.3 million romance scam.
Reacting to Nwadialo’s arrest, the Anambra state Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, Dr Law Mefor, said the state government cannot speak for the suspect, because he’s not a government appointee.
Prior to his arrest, Nwadialo had been indicted by a grand jury on December 6, 2023 for 14 counts of wire fraud totalling $3.3 million and a warrant was issued for his arrest. However, Nwadialo apparently was unaware of the indictment given his bold move to travel to the USA where he landed in the waiting trap of American law-enforcement agents.
According to the indictment and criminal complaint filed in the case, he defrauded his victims when he met them online on websites such as Match, Zoosk, and Christian Café. He used fictitious names and false images for his profile.
The case is being investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Sok Jiang.
In a statement shortly after the arrest of Nwadialo, the U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman said that the reason why most of the online scammers have not been apprehended is because they operate from locations outside the United States.
In an interview with TruthNigeria, a repentant online scammer based in Lagos state who identified himself as “Mr. Plato” said he scammed people, especially foreigners, because he needed money to pay his bills during the time he was in school.
“Towards the end of my academic programme in the University in 2010, my father, who was a lorry driver died, leaving me, my five siblings and my mother behind without any savings or source of income,” Mr. Plato said.
“Faced with the precarious situation, I decided to use my common sense and make money through interaction with people I met online. I started by begging money from friends online, but it didn’t work so I approached a classmate of mine and asked him to give me ideas because he had earlier talked about his exploits in the ‘game,’ according to Mr. Plato.
“There are two categories of online scamming practiced by fraudsters in Nigeria, namely, Yahoo yahoo and Yahoo plus, Mr. Plato went on to say.
“Yahoo yahoo is practiced by people whose aim is to defraud their victims through deception and blackmail.
“For Instance, a yahoo boy can cash out from a female victim residing in the USA by professing love to her and after a while, tell her that he needs money to enable him to process his travel documents and join her abroad. Once the victim pays up, the scammer will dump her. The victims in this instance are usually above 50 years of age. The yahoo boys in this instance use their real name and photo in their profile account.
“Another type of “yahoo yahoo” involves yahoo boys who use fake names and fake photographs for their profile online.
“Oftentimes, the scammer, posing as a lady, will introduce herself as a massage therapist or a hotel waitress and later, tell the victim to send her a gift card in return for her nude photos and videos, “Mr. Plato said.
The third type of “yahoo yahoo’ involves fraudsters who send emails to victims, telling them that they have won a certain huge amount of money in a lottery and requesting them to pay a small fee required to process the winning.
“Sometimes, unsuspecting victims fall for such lies and when they pay the first time, the scammer would ask them to pay more and more until the victim realizes that he has been duped,” according to Mr. Plato in an interview with TruthNigeria.
“However, fraudsters who practice yahoo plus use pre-registered sim (subscriber identity module) that are not traceable to them to log into the internet. They have allies in many countries in Europe and America and their victims are usually wealthy foreigners, bank officials and executives of oil companies,” Mr. Plato explained.
“To enable them to hypnotize their victims and collect huge amounts of money from them, yahoo plus operators engage in ritual sacrifice which often require the use of human body parts. People who practice yahoo plus in Nigeria are relatively few in number and they are among the top echelon of wealthy businessmen in the country,” Mr. Plato said.
Nigerian Scammers Practice Sextortion And Ritual Murder
Perpetrators of internet fraud in Nigeria are now using people for rituals and have also graduated to doing sextortion, according to the Attorney General Zonal Director, Lagos Zonal Command of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Michael Wetkaz.
“This has become an international disaster, as suicide seems to be the option for the victims abroad,” Wetkaz said in a statement in September 2024.
On November 18, 2024, the parents of a British teenager who took his own life after becoming a victim of sextortion made a direct appeal to Nigerian online scammers to stop “terrorising” the vulnerable.
Murray Dowey, from Dunblane, Scotland was only 16 when he ended his life last year after he was allegedly tricked by scammers into sending intimate pictures of himself and then blackmailed.
Evolution of Advance Fee Fraud In Nigeria
The first documented case of advance-fee fraud in Nigeria dates back to 1920 when a self – acclaimed magician known as P. Crentsil wrote a letter to a contact in the British colony of the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana with the intention to commit fraud.
Later in the 1940s, many colonial head teachers observed that a group of Nigerian schoolboys used magical powers to manipulate their victims and collect money from them, according to Suleman Lazarus in a scholarly article titled “Where Is the Money? The Intersectionality of the Spirit World and the Acquisition of Wealth,” published in February, 2019.
From 1990 onwards, the scams became known as 419 after the section of the Nigerian penal code which tackles such crimes.
The scams, which are conducted mostly online, via email and messaging apps, are usually romance scams which FBI special agent Michael Nail once referred to as “modern-day bank robbery.”
Online Scams Continue Despite Prosecution Of Culprits
Despite the fight against online scam and other forms of fraud in Nigeria by the anti–graft agencies, many scammers in Nigeria have refused to quit the illicit practice and swelling numbers of youths have joined them.
In September 2024, 150 suspected internet fraudsters were arrested at a school facility within an Army Estate in Effurun, Delta State.
The suspects were reported to have used the army estate, a highbrow residence for retired military officers and civilians, as a cover to perpetrate the crime, according to Bright Edafe, police spokesperson in the state.
In 2019, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the US indicted 80 people – 77 of them Nigerians – in what it describes as the “largest case of online fraud in US history”.
Ebere Inyama is an Imo State–based conflict reporter for TruthNigeria.
