200 african appropriations
I never replied to barrister Gerry Meyer. I had had email exchanges,
however, with a number of cyber scammers who were working with com-
parable “formats” even before I received his proposal.
In this chapter, I focus on Nigeria-related advance-fee fraud. Unso-
licited email messages suggesting “Urgent business proposals” or “100
percent risk-free” transfers of several millions of hard currency are famil-
iar to most users of electronic mail around the world who may find such
proposals in their in-boxes almost every day. Their authors operate in
the guise of the sons or widows of African ex-dictators, high government
officials, managers of national banks or ministers responsible for natural
resources, law yers, and even Nigeria Police Force. Invariably, such emails
refer to vast sums of money available for transfer into the addressee’s bank
account. He or she is offered a fair share of the money as recompense
for his or her assistance. Enticed by the prospect of a once-in-a-lifetime
chance to get rich quick, the victim is then lured into paying advance fees
that invariably arise in the guise of fictitious taxes and transfer costs or
bribes to fabricated officials. Getting their hands on this money, which
flows from Europe or America to Africa, and not in the opposite direc-
tion, as suggested in the seductive emails, is the fraudsters’ ultimate aim.
My main interest in this chapter is to gain an understanding as to how
the “Yahoo Boys,” as the scammers are referred to in Nigerian popular
discourse, operate.
I argue that scammers deliberately mimic orientalist notions of Africa
when crafting their emails. This argument is inspired by Jan Beek (2007),
who suggests that the scam letters are built on stereotypical Western im-
ages of Africans, and also draws on Andrew Smith’s (2009) textual analy-
sis of 550 such emails. On closer scrutiny, many scam letters turn out to tie
in with Western representations of Africa as perpetuated by news broad-
casters and other genres of dominant global mass media. The mimicry
of such representations is one of the strategies scammers use to induce
credibility in their Western marks. W hat is involved here is a special case
of contact and copy, in which the copy is not only used to evoke its original
(the common Western imagination of Africa) but actually turns against
those who are associated with the “sphere” of the original. Other copies,
such as forged bureaucratic paperwork and documents relating to interna-
tional business procedures, also play an important role in the subsequent