THE well-known ‘Nigerian scam’ has spread to both e-mail and mobile phone users, but the Central Bank said yesterday very few people on the island were being taken in and no further warnings would be issued.
A Nicosia woman told the Cyprus Mail she had received a call on her mobile phone at around 2am on Tuesday morning from a Dr Ahmed Abubakar, informing her that she was the beneficiary of a certain William Smith and he wished to close the file. She said she didn’t know anyone called William Smith.
“I immediately realised it was a scam,” she said. “He could have been more imaginative with the name.”
Abubakar asked the woman to call him back at a Lagos number to discuss the issue, but she refused. “I told him ‘you must be joking’ but he continued as if he were reading a prepared speech,” she said. “I asked him if someone in the Nigerian telecommunications authority (NITEL) had sold him my number. I asked him if he was a scam artist, but he just ignored my questions. Then he asked my name, and I told him that if he had a file on me, and my phone number then he must know my name.”
She said he seemed unfazed by the questions and insisted on continuing, so she decided to let him talk “as long as he was the one getting stuck with a large phone bill”.
Senior Central Bank official Andreas Philippou said yesterday that every now and then letters still came in from the Nigerian scammers. “We have stopped circulating notices to the banks because they are all familiar with these scams,” he said.
Philippou said that as far as the Central Bank was aware no one in Cyprus had fallen for any of the Nigerian con tricks, which essentially involve people handing over their bank account numbers in return for a commission on a supposed deposit to be made by the Nigerian, who usually poses as a government official or a relative of one of the country’s former wealthy rulers. The scammers then wipe out the accounts.
“The victims are promised huge amounts of money for merely providing details of their accounts,” Philippou said. “I hope no one could fall victim to their greed in this way.”
Philippou said that when such letters had circulated in the past, warning circulars would be issued by the Central Bank, but he said the financial community in Cyprus was now well aware that “these letters are not invitations to share huge wealth but a trap”.
Abubakar’s name appears on a blacklist of scammers detailed on a special website set up to expose them at www.nigerianscams.org A new scam involves being given a number to call back, which will cost the caller anything from $15 a minute to over $2,000 a minute in some cases.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
