Sending a DVX to Nigeria.

B

BoulderHVX200

Member
I just sold my DVX to someone on Craigslist and they are requesting that I send the camera to their friend who the camera is for in Nigeria. I don't want to get into hot water by shipping something that isn't allowed to another country. Does anyone have any information on this. Should it be a problem? I tried going onto the Export Trade administration website to no avail... Should I be worried ?
 
Nigeria has a bad rep. But mostly for things like:

"My name is xxx xxxxx, and I am a member of the royal family in exile. We have $92,000,000 in accounts that we need your help getting to..."

The camera is probably okay, but I'd make sure I received payment before shipping.
 
Anytime something gets shipped to someone other than claims to have bought it, you should be worried; and with the recipient being in Nigeria doubly so!

You should be more worried about getting your money; how are they paying, just to be curious?

The question you'd need to ask yourself: why can't THEY ship it to their friend in Nigeria?
 
This is a huge RED FLAG. Be very careful with this. As stated earlier, their method of payment will be very telling. Cashier's checks are faked all the time and you usually don't realize it until it's too late (I work at a bank and see it constantly).
 
My advice..... RUN!!! There are many, many scams where payment is made via Money order or certified check and the funds clear. After the merchandise is shipped, the bank comes back around to you to collect.

There is another scam where the buyer sends more money than you require and ask you to forward the additional funds to a third party. We encountered this scam from a posting on craigslist to rent a summer home in Maine.

If I were you, I'd only accept cash or keep looking for another buyer.

Best of luck to you and this to the scammers: :kali:
 
Nigeria? Is that even a real country anymore? I thought they got their country certificate revoked long ago.
 
DONT DO IT!

I don't even want to go into the story i had because I hate thinking about it.

I tried to sell an ipod on craigslist and 5 different e-mails e-mailed me in the first hour saying "What a lovely item! I'll buy for $400!!! (which was about $200 overpriced)."

They then each told me different stories about how it needs to be shipped to Nigeria for various reasons like weddings in Nigeria or shipped to a friend on business, etc.

They sent me a check for $400, which we found out was linked to a bank in Colorado and did not clear after about 2 weeks of the bank people trying to figure it out. I refused to ship until the money cleared (it never did).

He sent me a UPS thing for me to print out over e-mail and it said that he was paying $40 for the shipping. Turns out he had the thing rigged so that it appeared he was paying $40 for shipping, but infact I was paying over $300 for 1-night shipping straight to Nigera.

When the bank told us this guy's status, they said his account has been canceled for numerous reports of fraud, etc.

Never ship to Nigeria, or really anywhere non-local on Craigslist.

Even if there is somebody innocent wanting an item from Nigeria, it is just too bad for them.

I heard the majority of Nigeria's income is from internet fraud.

Stay far away from that place if you're dealing with money.
 
I need to bump this because it just happened to me. I sold a VX1000 on eBay to someone from England, she requested that I ship to her son in Nigeria. Payment was supposed to go via PPPay, a paypal like company that seemed legit. What I got though was the worst ever attempt at faking a payment email. I'm glad I never sent the camera.
 
I'm a full-time software engineer for an online payment processor, and one of my responsibilities is maintaining and enhancing our fraud control system.

I see hundreds of fraudulent payment attempts every day from places like Ghana and Nigeria, and I truly feel sorry for the honest people in those countries who find it impossible to buy anything online because their countrymen are such crooks.

Online scams create "Yahoo! millionaires"
In Lagos, where scamming is an art, the quickest path to wealth for the cyber-generation runs through a computer screen.


By Leonard Lawal, FORTUNE
May 22, 2006: 3:28 PM EDT

(FORTUNE Magazine) - Akin is, like many things in cyberspace, an alias. In real life he's 14. He wears Adidas sneakers, a Rolex Submariner watch, and a kilo of gold around his neck.

Akin, who lives in Lagos, is one of a new generation of entrepreneurs that has emerged in this city of 15 million, Nigeria's largest. His mother makes $30 a month as a cleaner, his father about the same hustling at bus stations. But Akin has made it big working long days at Internet cafes and is now the main provider for his family and legions of relatives.

Call him a "Yahoo! millionaire."

Akin buys things online - laptops, BlackBerries, cameras, flat-screen TVs - using stolen credit cards and aliases. He has the loot shipped via FedEx or DHL to safe houses in Europe, where it is received by friends, then shipped on to Lagos to be sold on the black market. (He figures Americans are too smart to sell a camera on eBay to a buyer with an address in Nigeria.)

Akin's main office is an Internet cafe in the Ikeja section of Lagos. He spends up to ten hours a day there, seven days a week, huddled over one of 50 computers, working his scams.

And he's not alone: The cafe is crowded most of the time with other teenagers, like Akin, working for a "chairman" who buys the computer time and hires them to extract e-mail addresses and credit card information from the thin air of cyberspace. Akin's chairman, who is computer illiterate, gets a 60 percent cut and reserves another 20 percent to pay off law enforcement officials who come around or teachers who complain when the boys cut school. That still puts plenty of cash in Akin's pocket.

A sign at the door of the cafe reads, WE DO NOT TOLERATE SCAMS IN THIS PLACE. DO NOT USE E-MAIL EXTRACTORS OR SEND MULTIPLE MAILS OR HACK CREDIT CARDS. YOU WILL BE HANDED OVER TO THE POLICE. NO 419 ACTIVITY IN THIS CAFE. The sign is a joke; 419 activity, which refers to the section of the Nigerian law dealing with obtaining things by trickery, is a national pastime. There are no coherent laws relating to e-scams, the police are mostly computer illiterate, and penalties for financial crimes are light.

No penalties for breaking the law

"The deterrent factor is not there at all," says Thomas Oli, a Lagos lawyer, citing the case of a former police inspector general who was convicted of stealing more than $100 million and got only six months in jail.

"What do you want me to do?" Akin asks in pidgin English, explaining why he turned to a life of Internet crime. "It is my God-given talent. Our politicians, they do their own; me, I'm doing my own. I feed my family - my sister, my mother, my popsie. Man must survive."

The scams perpetrated by Akin and his comrades are many and varied: moneygram interceptions, Western Union hijackings, check laundering, identity theft, and outright begging, with tall tales of dying relatives and large sums of money in search of safe haven. One popular online fraud often practiced by women (or boys pretending to be women) involves separating lonely men from their money.

Attempts to speak to government officials about Internet crime were futile. They all claimed ignorance of such scams; some laughed it off as Western propaganda.

But last November the Economic Fraud and Financial Crimes Commission won a high-profile case that had dragged on for years against Emmanuel Nwude, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years for bilking a Brazilian bank out of $242 million using an Internet scam involving phony bank drafts. The commission is also pursuing a case against 419 kingpin Fred Ajudua, a lawyer and businessman accused of using the Internet to steal $1 million from a victim in Germany.

Some officials, who asked not be identified, said young people are drawn to Internet crime as a way of getting back at a society that has no plans for them. Others see it as a form of reparation for the sins of the West. Or as Akin puts it, "White people are too gullible. They are rich, and whatever I gyp them out of is small change to them."
Click to expand...
 
they are still doing it. I put a camera on Ebay today,,,first time I've tried to sell something on Ebay. In a few minutes someone offered a lot for the camera and it was to be shipped to Nigeria. I said only shipping to the USA. They ask why and I said because of the scams in Nigeria,,,,they went offline.


It pisses me off. I would like to end the Ebay auction.
 
The scammers also use unwitting middlemen that were hired as "Shipping Processors" to accept merchandise at US addresses, and who then are supposed to forward the item overseas.

If you get any correspondence with really poor spelling or unusual expressions that lead you to believe the person isn't really in the US, or someone who doesn't care at all about price or is insisting on some specific payment method or even escrow site, be very careful.
 
Let me tell you my experience. Just a week and a half ago i was tyring to sell my old Canon GL-1. I resorted to Craigslist in hoping to find some one locally to give me cash and pick it up (in my lobby with the doorman there of course). I got an annoyance amount of responses. Half were completely fake (i even got the nigeria scam lol). Some offered like $300, or wait 2 weeks and he'll pay me the rest...Finally some one gave me a decent offer, i asked him to call me so i know he was "real" We spoke, but by the time he called me he was all of a sudden in Atlanta, not New York. This just seemed fishy. Finally i decided NOT to do it, and just posted it on Ebay, and was sold within the hour...i got my money and i just sent them the camera on Monday. Safe and Secure. So i advice you to be extremely cautious using Craigslist, and even Myspace ( i got a nigeria scam sent to there too!). Bottom line is, you cant be that desperate to sell and send it off to half way across the world. I'm sure there's plenty of people in the good ol' US of A that'll buy a dvx. Lol.
 
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