Master and Mugu 201course of such scams. For the scammers to succeed, the copies must be as
faithful to their originals as possible. By providing visual evidence in sup-
port of false claims, such bogus copies are important tools in the context
of the fraudsters’ strategies of persuasion. This conscious manipulation of
the deceptive effects of visual evidence links advance-fee fraud, targeted at
Westerners, not only to local forms of confidence tricks directed at Nige-
rians themselves but also to the sphere of magic and ritual. Hence in this
chapter, I outline a tentative genealogy of Nigerian fraud, which is based
on the same psychology and operational logic as magical performances.
Driven by a desire to look behind the letters and to find out more about
the mysterious Yahoo Boys, I conducted email and chat room interviews
with four cyber scammers and exchanged emails with a few more. This
approach was inspired by email interviews conducted by a self-proclaimed
anti-scamming activist who posed as a reporter with the pseudonym Rick
Hunter (2011) and offered 5,000 U.S. dollars per interview. Like R ick
Hunter, I sent out an interview request to approximately 200 email ad-
dresses of scammers collected in February 2008. Unlike Hunter, however,
I did not assume a false identity and offered payment of only one hundred
euros per completed questionnaire or online interview. Moreover, I ac-
tually paid my four respondents for answering my questions. A lthough
admittedly problematic, in both ethical and methodological terms, my
interviews allowed me not only to draw a tentative picture of the social
organization of a veritable industry based on cybercrime but also to re-
count the scammers’ own perspectives on their illicit craft. Additional
information gathered by Hunter, Daniel Jordan Smith (2007), and two
journalists (Buse 2005; Dixon 2005), who succeeded in conducting face-
to-face interviews with scammers, enrich my own data.^1
NIGERIAN FRAUD AND ITS ORIGINSThe fortunes offered in Nigerian scam emails are invariably explained
as originating from illegal sources. Thus, Mariam Abacha, widow of Ni-
geria’s late military head of state, Gen. Sani Abacha, offers 25 percent of
“the sum of 36.2. million usd (Thirty six million, two hundred thousand),”
which she intends “to use for investment purposes outside Nigeria and