Master and Mugu 215into such local forms of trick-based fraud. This is the case, in particular,
when scammers who operate transnationally finally meet their victims
face-to-face (Wizard 2000).
The Hausa say, “Seeing is better than hearing” (gani ya kori ji), that
is, visual evidence—seeing something with one’s own eyes—is always
superior to hearsay. A certain alhaji (a Muslim who has been to Mecca),
who approached two of my friends from Kano in 1996, in the hope that
they would help him “wash” a boxful of black notes he had bought, must,
in fact, have been blinded by this ma x im. W hen they showed me samples
of this “black money” (ba‘ kin kud‘ i), I initially thought that this was a
case of an overliteral interpretation of “money laundering.” At the time, I
was not yet familiar with the “wash-wash” trick. I only realized what was
going on a few years later when I read about a confidence trick in a local
Ger ma n new spaper. Accord i ng ly, a Tu rk l iv i ng i n M a i n z had fa l len v ic t i m
to two Africans who had sold him a suitcase full of dyed “money.” In the
meantime, a Nigerian friend named Tahir had told me how he had once
become the accomplice of such confidence tricksters. His story, however,
involves a variation on the black money scam, as it concerns white notes
which were supposed to be transformed into real money with the help of
a mysterious machine. Again, the presentation of visual evidence is the
main scamming mechanism used here.
Tahir is a radio mechanic. I met him while doing research in the Nige-
rian Lake Chad area at the end of the 1990s. W hen he told me how he had
built a money-making machine according to the fraudsters’ instructions, I
asked him to build a replica for me (see figure 7.1). The machine works on
the principle of a box with a false bottom. An apparently empty drawer is
opened, a white note is placed inside, and the drawer is closed. A button is
pushed and the machine starts working: lights flash; the noise of an elec-
tric motor and beeping can be heard. Finally, the drawer is opened again
and a bank note appears. If the victim is taken in, he or she is shown part
of the machine’s interior, which contains small bottles of different-colored
liquids—the “printing dyes.” As the level of the liquids is low, there obvi-
ously is not enough dye to produce more notes. Therefore, new dye must
be purchased before any further processing can take place. W hat emerges
from a visit to a rich dealer, an accomplice, to whom the fraudsters take
their victims, is the fact that the dyes are very difficult to obtain and hence