By Ovie Azigbo

A few months ago, I was accosted by a man I did not know from Adam. In a fit of rage, he said to me: “N70 million in 3 months! Imagine that! N70 million! Three months!”

Obviously at a loss what he was talking about, I said: “Sorry, I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He then pointed at a young man nearby and said: “Look at that man. He made N70 million from Yahoo! Yahoo! He left his father’s house and checked into a hotel in FestacTown. Three months later, he was back in his father’s house penniless. Now he begs for N200 from friends to buy recharge cards for his phone.”

The fellow he was talking about was a young man in his mid-twenties. He looked shabby and famished and I could swear he hadn’t come across N10, 000 in his life. I turned to the man who was talking to me. He was still seething and it was obvious that he was thinking of things he could do with N70 million. I shook my head and said: “Easy come, easy go.”

I had heard quite a few things about Internet scams but little did I know that the so-called Yahoo boys made so much money. I was curious and began to ask questions. That was when I was told that scammers no longer operate at the level of Yahoo Yahoo! They have advanced to Yahoo Plus.

“What the hell is Yahoo Plus?” I asked. Yahoo Plus is the advanced form of Yahoo Yahoo, I was told. It is the addition of spiritual dimension to Yahoo Yahoo. The scammer takes the details of his potential victims to a spiritualist or native doctor who prepares charms and incantations that will arrest the spirit of the victims making them susceptible to the obnoxiously outrageous demands of the scammer.

Internet scammers adopt various devices to defraud their victims. A common variant is that of a woman in Africa who claims that her husband has died and that she wants to leave millions of dollars of his estate to a good church. In every variation, the scammer promises obscenely large payments for small unskilled tasks.

This scam, like most scams, is too good to be true. Yet people fall for it. They use the potential victim’s emotions and willingness to help against him, promising to give him a large part of their business or family fortune. All the victim has to do is cover the endless “legal” and other “fees” that must be paid to the people that can release the scammer’s money.

The more the victim is willing to pay, the more they will suck out of his wallet. The victim will never see any of the promised money because there isn’t any.

They use a variety of reasons to explain why they need the potential victim’s help. They may claim that political climate or legal issues preclude them from accessing funds in a foreign account.

They may also claim that the potential victim’s last name is that of the deceased person who owned the account and suggest that the victim act as the next of kin of the person in order to gain access to the funds.

Many youths are attracted to internet fraud. It is common to see young men with no visible means of livelihood driving exotic cars. Even students are being lured into it.

Interestingly, it has been observed that no matter how much money the Yahoo boys acquire from internet scams, they always fall back to zero. They lose everything. It is a case of easy come, easy go.