Master and Mugu 207Despite the growing attention attracted by and knowledge of Nigeria-
related advance-fee fraud in the Global North, the scammers are not run-
ning out of business. The simplest but nonetheless most efficient strat-
egy is to maximize output through “mass-bombing”: sending neutrally
addressed formats to as many people as possible. Another strategy is to
customize such formats to individual addressees, like the email I received
from barrister Gerry Meyer of Cotonou. This method involved gathering
individual email addresses through search engines, yellow pages on the
web, and company websites, and then feeding them manually into email
programs by copying and pasting. This was a time-consuming process and
necessitated the modification of the format each time a new addressee was
inserted (Igwe 2007). To speed up this process, scammers used a combina-
tion of different media and software, including the chat program icq and
its search tool “people search”:
During the day, they would watch foreign tv shows and documentaries
and read foreign magazines and newspapers, scouting for names of vic-
tims. At night, they would invade all the cyber cafés with lists of names.
They would open their icq , type in a name, choose an age range, and all
e-mail addresses bearing that name would appear.... A respondent told
me that icq was a place where one could find “real mugus.” (Igwe 2007: 34)With the help of email extractors—programs that extract email addresses
from portions of text copied from the internet, such as the lists obtained
from icq—lists of plain email addresses of people bearing the same names
could be produced and then copied and pasted into an email program.
This enabled the scammers to combine “mass-bombing” with customized
formats using individual names.
Another reaction to the increased attention to 419 scams is the creation
of new formats, such as lottery scams, charity scams, and romance scams,
which no longer refer to Nigeria, or even Africa, but to many other places
around the globe (Igwe 2007: 76–85). Despite this textual shift away from
Nigeria on the surface of the scam letters, and although advance-fee fraud
is spreading around the world at a considerable rate with the result that du-
bious unsolicited business proposals are also sent from computers located
in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, at the time of my research in
2008, two-thirds of the emails still originated in West Africa, most notably
Nigeria (D. J. Smith 2007: 39–40).