Cameroon: 22 Internet fraudsters arrested

[Stinger]

Solomon Tembang Mforgham, AfricaNews reporter in Buea, Cameroon
Cameroon's Interpol has arrested 22 Internet scammers in less than a month after the its parliament voted for a bill to set up a cyber police force to fight alarming cyber crime. The report revealed that the youth use social networks such as Facebook, Hi5 to rip-off their victims with false profiles.


The Internet fraudsters, the report said, are based in Cameroonian towns such as Bamenda, Yaounde, Limbe, Buea and Douala while in the Diaspora in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Ussuriysk in Ukraine, London in the United Kingdom, Berlin in Germany, Ivory Coast and Nigeria.

Most of the scammers, who use pseudonyms, get into the profile of victims either on facebook, skype and other chat forums on the Internet; lure them into love fantasies which end up in huge monetary transactions that end up in their disappearance once the deal has been sealed.

The example is told of an American girl who created a facebook profile to escape the burden of loneliness created by the breakup of a relationship.

Having one of her paternity from Cameroon, she began adding people from Cameroon to her profile, although she had never visited the country.

Less than two months ago, she was contracted by one of the Cameroonians in her profile who is based in Kuala Lumpur. She was carried by what soon became a love scam. She fell in for the scammer.

A very intelligent and rich student, she promised to sponsor his entry into the United States of America and to help him get into the same University where, of course she will unilaterally bear the burden of paying the fees.

After buying a plane ticket to spend vacation with her new lover in Malaysia, she gave access to her scammer lover to collect money from her account to book a hotel and rent a car for her stay in Malaysia.

The girl later realized a huge sum of money has been cashed from her account with the new lover gone into the wilderness.