Article about email scammers in Ghana

From a newspaper in Uganda: http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/World/-/6 ... 11kh4x1/-/

Of Ghana’s ‘cafe boys’ and their internet lifestyle
By FRANCIS KOKUTSE (email the author)
Posted Saturday, November 19 2011 at 00:00

Remittances from abroad have over the year surpassed the money Ghana gets from donor partners, according to the World Bank and the Bank of Ghana. But some of these remittances come from outright fraud.

A growing number of Ghanaian young men have been duping unsuspecting people around the globe through the internet to send them money through Western Union.

A favourite trick is to pose as attractive girls and to post such photographs through the internet to the people they were communicating with. The young men who have chosen to earn their living this way have come to be known in Accra as ‘Cafe Boys’. Some of them are doing well indeed, as can be seen from their expensive cars.

The activities of these ‘Cafe Boys’ have increased the number of internet cafes around the country. If one counted the cafes that have sprung up across Accra and other urban centres, including in slum areas, it might give the impression that Ghana was making it big with Information Technology, which is far from the reality.

The young men who sit behind the computers in the cafes from morning to evening were just looking for gullible men and women to befriend.
Across Accra’s poor neighbourhoods of Musuku, Nima, Sukura and Madina Zongo, smart young entrepreneurs have discovered that putting up internet cafes was a profitable business.

One of them, Mr Inusah Musah, told Saturday Monitor: “I do not have any background in IT, but I realised that in the neighbourhood where l live, there was no internet cafe and l decided to set up one with just seven computers.” “After only eight months, l now have 15 computers and l am planning to move into a bigger place,” he added.

Mr Musah does not pry into what his clients are doing, but he said he could notice from the way they went about their activities that they were engaged in some form of illegal act.

One boy who refused to be named said he had received money from a man in Sweden. “He is a homosexual and l told him in email and on the phone that l have fallen in love with him. He asked for my picture and l just scanned a picture l cut from an American magazine and sent it to him, from then on, he has become my ‘boyfriend’ even though l am not gay.”

The boy is a junior secondary school dropout. He revealed that the Swedish man had been planning to visit him in Ghana, but he made up stories to avoid meeting the gay man.