News
Nigeria’s Internet Fraudsters Focus on Corporate e-mail – Report
West Africa’s infamous Internet scammers have shifted their targets from impersonations of online love interests, princes and US soldiers to hijacking corporate e-mails, costing businesses hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
It is a much more lucrative venture that works by gaining access to corporate e-mail login details or passing off almost-identical addresses as the real deal, a scam known as business e-mail compromise (BEC), according to a report by cyber security firm CrowdStrike.
These Nigerian rackets now dwarf other types of online criminal theft, amounting to at least $5.3 billion of losses between October 2013 and the end of 2016, said CrowdStrike and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3).
“There’s a disproportionate amount of criminal gains they get from it. The lion’s share of ill-gotten, fraudulent money is around these business e-mail compromise attacks. It’s a huge problem for our customer set,” Adam Meyers, vice-president of intelligence at California-based CrowdStrike, told Reuters.
Nigeria has become one of the hubs of BEC. Nigerian online fraudsters, known as “Yahoo boys”, became notorious for trying to pass themselves off as people in financial need or Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on an investment.
The capers became known as “419 scams” after the section of the national penal code that dealt, ineffectively, with fraud.
Yahoo boys even impersonated a US forces commander in Afghanistan to defraud people by asking for help in recovering the assets of deceased soldiers. It forced the commander to issue a Facebook statement saying he would never try to contact anyone asking for financial help.
Now the scammers have bigger fish to fry, with the potential gains amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, according to CrowdStrike.
Behind the fraudsters is an organised crime network with its hands in human trafficking, drugs, prostitution, money laundering and e-mail fraud and cyber crime, the CrowdStrike report said. “The magnitude of this criminal threat has only recently begun to be understood.”
The Black Axe gang sprang from Nigerian universities and now extends from Africa to North America, Europe and Asia. Its targets have ranged from semiconductor makers to schools in US states including Connecticut and Minnesota, passing themselves off as executives and lawyers to trick employees into wiring sometimes millions of dollars a day into bank accounts.
From there, the money is quickly laundered through a series of bank accounts that can be traced to Hong Kong and China, where the trail often goes cold because diverging regulations foil monitoring, Meyers said.
With that money, the Nigerian scammers are often enjoying the high life, said Meyers, noting social media accounts filled with pictures of them posing with luxury Mercedes cars, gold watches, jewellery and champagne.
“It’s really hard to stop; you can’t stop it with anti-virus or any kind of software, it’s really kind of a human problem.”
Legit.ng recently joined forces with the Shade of Life Foundation to become a voice of autism, and drive advocacy for improved media support during Autism Awareness Month.
Participants at the event
Conversations around media support exploration was led by Joseph Omotayo, head of Department for Human Interest Stories at Legit.ng, and Dr. Eziafakaku Nwokolo, founder and CEO of the Shade of Life Foundation,
This partnership is a response to the concerns raised by organizations like the Shade of Life Foundation about the level of support received from the media in discussing autism as a disability.
While other disabilities may receive attention, autism, with its critical developmental implications often lacks adequate representation in mainstream media.
Recognizing the importance of addressing these concerns, Legit.ng took proactive steps by integrating itself into the essence of autism awareness.
It facilitated a one-hour workshop with Dr. Nwokolo, the founder of the foundation, to deepen our understanding of autism, its various spectrums, and the language boundaries associated with it.
Other steps we took in advocating autism awareness in the media, can be seen in our attached press release.
Legit.ng believes that by amplifying the voices of autism and advocating for better media representation, we can contribute to creating a more inclusive and accepting society for all.
While 85 per cent of Nigeria is in darkness, Tanzania, an African country has shut down five hydroelectric stations in a bid to reduce excess electricity in the national grid.
Kassim Majaliwa, prime minister, Tanzania, has said the main plant, Mwalimu Nyerere Hydroelectric Station, alone generated enough electricity to power major cities, including Dar es Salaam, the country’s commercial hub.
It is the first time Tanzania, which suffers chronic power shortages, has closed hydroelectric stations due to excess production.
“We have turned off all these stations because the demand is low and the electricity production is too much, we have no allocation now,” an official from state-run power company, Tanesco, said.
The 2,115MW Julius Nyerere Hydropower Dam is said to be almost filled with water following heavy rains that started early this year.
Meanwhile, while the country has an installed capacity of 1,938MW and the grid installed capacity of 1,899MW, Nigeria which has an installed capacity of 13,000MW is struggling to electrify 85 per cent of its electricity consumers.
President Bola Tinubu has approved the appointment of Jim Ovia, renowned banker and businessman, as the Chairman, Board of the Nigerian Education Loan Fund.
Jim Ovia
Ovia’s appointment is contained in a State House statement titled, ‘President Tinubu appoints Jim Ovia as Chairman of the Nigerian Education Loan Fund,’ and issued on Friday by Ajuri Ngelale, special adviser to the President, Media & Publicity.
The statement noted that “Ovia is the founder of one of Nigeria’s leading banks and a respected business leader, with a surfeit of efforts and benefaction towards nurturing and empowering young Nigerians.
“He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School and holds a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Louisiana.”
The National Student Loan Programme is a pivotal intervention that seeks to guarantee sustainable higher education and functional skill development for all Nigerian students and youths.
The Nigerian Education Loan Fund, the implementing institution of this innovation, demands excellence and Nigerians of the finest professional ilk to guide and manage.
“The President believes Mr. Ovia will bring his immense wealth of experience and professional stature to this role to advance the all-important vision of ensuring that no Nigerian student suffers a capricious end to their pursuit of higher education over a lack of funds,” the statement partly read.
Ovia’s appointment will also ensure “that Nigerian youths, irrespective of who they are, have access to higher education and skills that will make them productive members of society and core contributors to the knowledge-based global economy of this century.”
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