Large parts of West Africa have communications blackouts after damage was found on the major undersea fiberoptic cable, known as SAT-3, which supplies countries such as Benin, Togo, Niger and Nigeria. The cable runs from Portugal and Spain to South Africa, via West Africa and has cut 70% of Nigeria’s bandwidth, causing severe problems for its banking sector, government and mobile phone networks.
The effects are expected to last as long as two weeks and I will be interested to see if this makes any difference to the numbers of 419 (aka AFF or simply ‘Nigerian’) scam solicitations, considering that the major source of the scourge is the West coastal coutries of Africa due to the endemic corruption and poor policiing in the region.
I look forward to the first email ….
“Due to the recent undersea cable fault, banking institutions had to resort to using cash-only transactions and I have found a large chest containing a huge amount of cash in US Dollars – I need someone in the west to help me to move it to the USA …..”
A backup, the West Africa Cable System linking southern and western African countries with Europe should be in service by 2011. This link will massively improve Internet speeds for South Africa, Angola, the Canary Islands, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, Portugal and the United Kingdom. It will also bring submarine links online for the first time to the countries of Namibia, the Congo and Togo.
We shall see….
August 15th, 2009 at 2:22 am
In past few weeks i have recieved scores of mails in my mailboxes alluring to huge cash awards winnings for me. I got apprehensive since the style and contents of most mail indicated that the origin of all such mails that informed me of cash winning totalling now to moe than 100 million usd, seemed as from one place although all carried different email ids. I noticed that they all lured to to collect the winning price but none was willing to transfer dirct through swift bank transfer. They all demanded money on one pretext or the other. I have not aid a dime upfront to any of these and now they seem to have understood that I am not the one thwy wished to trap me in thier scam loting game.
but I wonder why UK Government or Microsoft or Burkina Faso canot get these scamsters….i am sure they are making money with the lies and lies by cheating thousands of unsuspecting victims on daily bases. It seems to be an Industry that cannot florish without the laxity on the part of law enforcing security agencies.
What are the ways to contain this menance..?
ashok