Supporting the “status symbol of a narrow elite” explanation would be the hottest new apps of August 13th. The $100 “CFA Exam Audio Series: Level II 2013″ hit No.3 in the Nigerian app market, while the $70 “King James Silver Study Bible” debuted at No.7. The rather exclusive nature of a CFA study aid would seem to imply that the Nigerian app market is resting on an extremely narrow demographic footprint.
Apparently the 2 people taking the Level 2 exam in Nigeria like to study on their iPhones - I guess any publicity is good publicity…
I’m Nigerian and this is just weird. Very different world.
I wouldn’t use the word ‘scammer’ as loosely to represent a certain group of people given that there are individuals such as Bernie Madoff, Jon Corzine etc.
Really, I would. Nigeria worked hard to earn this and now you get to own it. Every letter or email I have ever received from Nigeria is a scam. There were plenty of nice people in Germany during world war 2 and they didn’t do enough to stop Hitler and the nazis. And now Germany will always have this stigma. You can do something about it, stop the people doing it.
Also, notice how we put Madoff in Jail? That’s important. I wish to Hell that Corzine would go to jail but it looks like he’s either protected from on high by Obama or that he managed not to do anything criminal, just incompetent.
Over 1000 candidates in Nigeria registered for L1 in 2009.
1000 > 2
There is a large number of Nigerian working in the city of London. I have personally come across at least a dozen. Remember the UBS rogue trader? He is Nigerian.
I read somewhere that there are more “nigerian” e-mail scams coming from US than from Nigeria - scammers can be anywhere. According to The Economist, apparently scammers like to use the dumbest most obvious e-mails (like the 15-year old nigerian prince one), so they can target the dumbest most naive “customers”.
It seems that the cost of dealing with people who asked questions was eating their margins away.
@ChickenTikka. And you think the ones who are found guilty of cyber crimes aren’t put in jail? And so what if Bernie Madoff is in jail. That’s like saying that since Bernie Madoff is in prison now, scamming in the USA has been completely eradicated. There will be another after him and another after that person. In that light, should I refer to Americans as scammers?
@CFASniper. Actually Kweku Adoboli is Ghanaian. He was born there and actually moved to the UK at the age of 11 and I believe lived there until his rogue trading predicament. No Nigerian affiliation whatsoever. So his rogue trading mindset was likely established in Ghana or the UK. Take your pick.
My conclusion gentlemen is that scamming occurs everywhere and therefore it’s not justifiable to coin only one group of people as scammers. I’m by no means defending the acts of the cyber criminals that exist in Nigeria. I could care less if they decided to execute them on national television for their crimes. I’m just saying that many first world countries have scammers of their own and it’s plenty ironic for them to point to another group and call them scammers. Be advised that there are other groups of people participating in this masking themselves as Nigerians.
The funny thing is those emails “from Nigeria” aren’t actually from Nigeria. They use that to find suckers. Read this to become less stereotypical and learn a little about the art of spam: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf
The above is what crazyman was hinting it. It’s the actual paper.