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YahooThe entire internet world is flooded with the news of Nigerian scams. These scams range from what I refer to as low-level scams to high-level scams. The low-level scams are said to be dating scams, wherein a scammer pretends to be genuinely interested in an online relationship but with the intent of defrauding the victim of monies. The high-level ones are the ones that involve very large sums of money and valuables.
It is a very disheartening thing that most people, especially people from the western world, still fall victim to Nigerian scammers both online and off line. It should be pointed out that these people also have westerners as accomplices in the unscrupulous games that they play. Most people believe that out of every 10 Nigerians on the face of the earth, 9 if not all of them are scammers. But it sounds funny to me to hear that, because that means there will always be a scam in every home in Nigeria. This is not true.
Thankfully, the Nigerian scams are avoidable. How avoidable? The main problem of most online and off line Nigerian scam victims is greed. Yes, greed. Let me give you an example.
A seller on the popular ebay auction site put up a phone for sale for the price of $250. Then he received an email outside of the ebay community from a person presumed to be a citizen and resident of the United States asking him to sell the phone to him at a price of $1500 and that the phone is to be sent to his son, who is a student in a West African university. Then the seller decided to take the offer. He closed the auction on ebay, having been sent an email presumed to be from Paypal notifying him of the payment for the phone. He also went to send the phone to the supposed son of the buyer. To his amazement, the supposed paypal payment was fake and the person comes out to be another scammer from Nigeria.
Below are steps by which you can avoid Nigerian scams:
Do not be greedy. Do not be fooled into selling your items far above the normal price. If an offer seems too good to be true, it's probably some kind of scam.
Do not sell or do business transactions with anybody offering you a risk-free transaction outside the stipulated rules governing any business venture.
Take your time to check out the identity of the person you are transacting with. Tell the person to give you his or her phone number. Some people use free redirected mobile phone numbers so take your time to verify them very well.
Do not release vital information about your bank account(s), email and home addresses when you don't know if it is safe. Some scammers put up fake websites to get victims' personal details.
Make sure that the sites you visit with your credit and debit cards are secured. If the site is not trusted and you don't see the evidence that the page is secured, don't enter credit or debit card information.
