FBI AND THE ‘SEXTORTION’ RING
There is urgent need to invest in cybersecurity infrastructure
Committed mostly by the young, often called ‘Yahoo Boys’, some fraudsters are increasingly taking advantage of social media to engage in all manner of cross border crimes that continue to sully the image of Nigeria abroad. Last week in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced the arrest in our country of 22 cyber fraudsters who sexually blackmailed and extorted minors in their country. In coordination with multiple law enforcement partners, the FBI said it “conducted Operation Artemis—a surge of resources and personnel to Nigeria to address the high rate of sextortion related suicides attributed to Nigerian perpetrators.” About half of the 22 suspects in the latest arrest were directly linked to victims who took their own lives, according to the FBI.
The FBI investigation and arrests have raised several pertinent questions about the credibility of law enforcement in our country. How many innocent children in Nigeria have died due to the activities of these criminal elements? While authorities in our country assist the FBI in apprehending these criminals, when will they consider the lives of Nigerians important enough to exercise such diligence? Cybercrime refers to criminal acts that are facilitated using the computer, internet or network devices. But to identify Nigerians as breeding scammers whose online activities lead innocent children to commit suicides abroad is a new low, even when we may never know how many people they have also aided to kill in Nigeria.
In 2015, the Cybercrime Act was passed into law to address these challenges. The law criminalises a variety of offences – from ATM card skimming, hacking, identity theft to distributing child pornography. It imposes, for instance, seven-year imprisonment for offenders of all kinds and additional seven years for online crimes that result in physical harm, and life imprisonment for those that lead to death. But like almost every law in the country, there is the problem of enforcement.
Meanwhile, from social networking and research to business and commerce, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) system are ordinarily deployed to perform simple as well as complex tasks. But the cyberspace is also vulnerable to the activities of criminals. Sadly, as most people know to our collective shame, Nigeria has not only been a playground for most of these nefarious practices, but some of our citizens have also become notorious for committing sundry cyber-enabled fraud. “Foreign citizens perpetrate many BEC scams,” a damning statement by the American Department of Justice (DoJ) said in June 2019. “Those individuals are often members of transnational criminal organisations, which originated in Nigeria but have spread throughout the world.”
What marks out the Nigerian gangs operating internationally is their predominantly financial and economic focus. Yet, it is not only abroad that these cyber criminals deploy their negative skills, but they also do a lot of damage at home. So endemic is the problem that the Senate disclosed four years ago that Nigeria lost about $450 million to 3,500 cyber-attacks on its ICT space, representing about 70 per cent of hacking attempts in the country, at that period.
The real challenge, of course, is abroad. In March 2021, six Nigerians were charged in three criminal complaints in connection with their roles in expansive online fraud schemes (including romance scams and Covid-19 pandemic unemployment assistance fraud) targeting individuals in the United States. A month later, another Nigerian was charged for mail fraud, attempted mail fraud, and mail and wire fraud conspiracy, in connection with using social media to target elderly victims. And just a few weeks later, an aide to a Southwest governor was also arrested by the FBI, following his alleged involvement in COVID-19 unemployment fraud in the same country.
To deal with this growing threat to the country’s digital economy, there is an urgent need to improve the capacity of critical institutions in the sector, and the sharing of cyber security best practice from across the globe. In addition, we must build the capacity of local law enforcement to apprehend these criminal elements who target innocent children, and bring them to justice.
