Is anything being done to stop Nigerian scams?

People do fall for such scams otherwise the scammers wouldn't bother.

Internet costs and international phone calls aren't cheap in a country (Nigeria) where 60% of the population lives on <$1 a day (although it should be said that people on such a level of poverty are not the scammers!).

How do you stop it?

You can't stop the emails being sent.

Scammers have software that will harvest 1000's of email addresses from the web - they bundle them up into mailing lists and can send multiple 100's at a time.

The email addresses are free (yahoo / hotmail / gmail etc) and can be set up in minutes.

Scammers will set up many addresses on a theme

e.g. scam01@xxx, scam02@xxx, scam03@xxx and so on.

When scam01 gets shut down through bulk mailing triggering the webhosts spam filters, they switch to scam02 and carry on.

The scams letters you receive ('catchers') are pre-written and so it's just a simple matter of inserting whatever particular 'work name' the scammer is using and press send. A child of 14 could do it - and often they are doing just that.

'Yahooists' or 'Yahoo Boys' (as they are known in Nigeria) are treated as godlike by the local populace and it would be a very brave individual who would turn in a scammer to the authorities.

The Nigerian government has set up the EFCC (Economic and Finance Crimes Commission) and it is making headway but the process is slow.

Many Nigerian scammers have moved out into neighbouring countries - Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, Ghana etc and are now more difficult to catch.

...and it's not just Nigerians who carry out scams!

Nigeria gets the 'bad press' as it has given the name to these scams: 419 is the Nigerian Criminal code for advanced fee frauds.

It's true that Nigeria is the source of the majority of scams that are sent from Western Africa, but then it is the most populous country in that region.

The FBI cannot enforce the law beyond the mainland USA and so is effectively powerless.

The best 'weapon' against scams in awareness.

Once you know it's a scam, then the scammer is impotent - but with more and more people getting access to the 'net for the first time, scammers are always in with a chance of picking up the odd naive user.

It's also very important not to deride victims of scams as greedy or stupid - this attitude means that victims will not report the scam and those that fall for a scam are often from the most vulnerable in society and need to be made aware that scams come in many different forms.

It can be helpful (even enjoyable!) to mess around with scammers by wasting their time through emails - it's called Scambaiting and has a notable impact on the scammers.

Time spent with filling out my totally useless forms or going on a 5 hour car drive is time spent away from the PC - and while they're away from the PC, they ain't scamming.

...and they sure aren't going to get a penny out of me..... !! :D

There's not really much you can do as far as the USA gov't and the Nigerian gov't are concerned. This is the day and age of the internet after all. If people are going to be that stupid and think that somebody is going to pay them a million dollars US if they FIRST SEND THEM $10,000US in cash, then yes, you almost deserve it.

P.S. There is a hit song/video in Nigeria by a band that the lyrics go something like "We taka da stupid American's money".

Stupidity cannot be stopped or protected by Governments.

Greed has the same problem.

One has to realize first that you do not get something for nothing. If it sounds to easy, why would they give you so much in return. Why did they pick you out of all the people around?

Nigeria is only the top story because the cops catch most of the Americans that do this same thing.

nope nothing is being done it is actually something i wish they could crack down on as i have been scammed by a company in england an thru nigeria the scam was completed.... oh how i dream of revenge one day

As long as there are newbies on the internet, Nigerian scams will continue!