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Comment by Geekette | Hacker News Reader

I find the statement Most traffic coming from Nigeria is fraudulent to be bollocks. Like many countries, criminals comprise a minority of the Nigerian population and correspondingly, net fraudsters comprise a minority of the Nigerian online population.

Interestingly, the 2011 top 10 countries by # of reported complaints of net fraud are: 1) United States 90.99% 2) Canada 1.44% 3) United Kingdom 0.97% 4) Australia 0.66% 5) India 0.50% 6) Puerto Rico 0.22% 7) South Africa 0.22% 8) France 0.19% 9) Germany 0.19% 10) Russian Federation 0.17%

Source: Internet Crime Complaint Center (FBI) www.ic3.gov/media/2012/120511.aspx

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I find the statement Most traffic coming from Nigeria is fraudulent to be bollocks.

I don't.

Criminals are minority of the Nigerian population, but that minority spends an inordinate amount of their energy trolling online and looking for new venues that regular Nigerians are not likely to visit.

Therefore if you're a US based and targeted company, the majority of YOUR Nigerian traffic IS likely to be fraud. It isn't most of the fraud that you've got to deal with, but it is likely to be so ridiculously obvious and easy to deal with that you'd be a fool not to.

(Of course this is widely enough known that Nigerian scammers use proxies to hide their origin.)

The jury is still out on this one. Unless you can show some numbers, it's hard to see this as anything but a subjective extrapolation of the facts.

Nonetheless, Sift Science's claim is at best poorly worded because it gives armor to the false and unfair interpretation that the majority of regular Nigerians folks are fraudulent, which by itself begs the question.

I no longer have numbers. It was several years ago that I was working for a US-only company that decided to add a customer to customer piece, then got targeted by scammers. But we definitely rediscovered the fact that IPs from Nigeria were entirely scammers, and so were messages saying Nigeria. Oh, and "Western Union" was not a phrase you want to see and so on.

It was a black hole sink. And since it was at best marginal to that business, that piece eventually got shut down.

uhm, you know the stats you just cited were for victims? Complainants are the people making the complaint. Says nothing about where the perpetrator behind the complaint comes from.

This is because most online fraudsters over the world target US companies and individuals.

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