The Unintended Consequences of ICT in Sub-Saharan Africa

Akin is, like many things in cyberspace, an alias. In real life he\u27s 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\u27s 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 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\u27s 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\u27s 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\u27s 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\u27s pocket. (Quoted from http://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic- 37929.0.html)