Once upon a time email was a wonderful thing. If you wanted to tell someone something, you could just write them an email and, viola, they'd have it almost instantly. It beat hell out of having to buy stamps, which went up in price every year, drop it in the mailbox, and wait. Then came the spammers and the scammers, flooding mailboxes around the world with heart-wrenching 419 letters, non-existent lottery winnings, ads for Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, weight loss, chain letters, multilevel marketing schemes, mortgages, penny stock tips, Russian lolitas doing improbable things with their pants off, and a thousand other things that have since rendered the originally wonderful thing nearly useless. The sheer volume of my spam makes it difficult to locate messages I actually want to read, and this is after blocking half the servers in China.
My hatred of spammers is second only to my hatred of hackers, and I may hate both more than I hate Islamists. |
The Anti-Fraud Bureau (AFB), a non-governmental organisation, in Ghana has started a fight against scam tendencies under the "West Africa Advance Fee Fraud" in Accra, Ghana. "Our hospitality has been over-stretched by other nationals in collaboration with self-seeking Ghanaians who have capitalized on the conducive business environment to operate both offshore and locally to dupe unsuspecting investors," Kofi Owusu, the Executive Director of AFB said.
AFB is using the media to warn Ghana's investors against the operations of the fraudsters. It will also carry out intelligence services and make available relevant information to Ghana's government and security offices. The mass media advocacy campaign seeks to sensitise both local and foreign investors, offer intelligence reports to the security agencies and government officials and make Ghana unsafe for 419 operations.
Owusu added that the fraudsters' operations in Ghana have sometimes received backing from Ghana's public officials. "Ghana has become a citadel and safe haven for 419 operatives in the West Africa sub-region due mainly to the connivance of some security personnel and public officials," he said. |