Dark Strokes

 So I saw this headline on the BBC this morning: "Tories pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan." Given the fact that the United Kingdom's Conservative Party feels that the most pressure on it is coming from Nigel Farage and the Reform Party to their political right, this makes sense. But I'll come back to this.

Because there was another headline that caught my attention: "'I have everything to ruin you' - BBC tracks down sextortion scammer targeting teenage boys." I have a passing interest in Internet fraud, and the media coverage thereof; accordingly, I wanted to see if the article had anything interesting or new in it. The piece is bookended by the stories of Kari and Brad Boettler and South Carolina State Representative Brandon Guffey (R-48th District). Each had a son, Evan Boettler and Gavin Guffey, respectively, who committed suicide after who they thought was a young woman turned out to be an internet blackmailer, or "sextortionist" in common parlance.

But the headline notes that the BBC tracked down one of these Internet extortionists, and that's what I was interested in. The trail takes them to Nigeria, and they start talking to people there. The Nigerians, unsurprisingly, do not come off well. This statement about Nigeria's "Yahoo Boys" sets the tone for much of the middle of the story:

These young men, often in their 20s, live in impoverished areas but dream of fast cars and quick money.

The first young man they speak to is identified only as "Ola." He comes across as callous, due to poverty; he's quoted as saying "I don't feel bad because I need the money." Interestingly, it's not noted what he needs the money for. The reader is left to presume that he simply wants to wealth, and the status in his community that comes with it. Ola is also presented as being ignorant, "It was apparently impossible for Ola to believe a British or American teenager couldn't pay. In his mind, being born in the West automatically meant privilege." Which is easy enough to understand, I suppose, but Ola is also shown as being Internet-savvy enough to create fake profiles of young women, using internet-based tools to generate names. As an aside, it takes a certain amount of knowledge to use these properly... otherwise one can wind up creating a LinkedIn profile for a woman named "Keith."

Of the prestigious "Mc" family, no less!

When the BBC talks to "Ghost," a leader of a "Hustle Kingdom" or group of young men collectively engaged in online frauds of various sorts, he "said they were mainly conducting financial scams, mostly romance, not sextortion, as he was a 'God-fearing person.' He said only people with a 'black heart' did this." One wonders precisely which school of Christian theology allows for defrauding people by tricking people into thinking they've found a new (if financially needy) life partner, but frowns on the rug-pull of attempting to blackmail them.

"Ghost's" religiosity becomes a convenient segue to the next bit of the story, in which we're told that the Yahoo Boys engage in "visiting local priests to bless scams, and to cast spells they believed would make victims more compliant, or protect the scammers from being caught." Case in point being one "Ade," who allows the BBC to tag along as he visits a "cyber-spiritualist" for a ritual "a ritual the spiritualist said would bind him to wealth and protection," and involved the sacrifice, and partial consumption, of a dove.

When I asked how common this was, the healer told me he saw six or seven Yahoo Boys a day. For Ade, it was not superstition but a business expense.

I suspect that for most of the BBC's readers, especially in (but not limited to) the industrialized West, it is simply superstition. Backwardness pressed into service to facilitate crime. Not that Nigerians are above using the tools of high-technology; and shelling out for them. The next fraudster the BBC speaks to reporting hiring a woman to facilitate his frauds, and spending $3,500 on a deepfake face-swapping tool, claiming that the returns justified the investment.

The story turns back to the United States for a time, getting responses to the concerns raised from Meta and Snap. To be sure, they don't come off all that great, either, but corporate CYA-speak rarely does. But we do go back to Nigeria one last time, as it turns out that the BBC was specifically looking for whomever had extorted Evan Boettler. They were unable to find him, because the Nigerian ISP GloWorld, had failed to keep user information as it was supposed to. Whether out of incompetence or deliberate non-compliance (among other possibilities) is a mystery.

None of the Nigerians photographed or on video in the piece show their faces; apparently ski masks are all the rage there these days. (Maybe they hit the slopes after a hard say in the fraud mines.) Which raised a question for me: Who were they afraid would be able to identify them? And if what they were doing was illegal enough in Nigeria that fear of arrest and prosecution was reasonable, why did the BBC not present any interviews with authorities there, seeking to understand what was being done to combat the problem?

As I  noted before, Nigerian, and perhaps sub-Saharan Africans more broadly, do not come off well in this story. There's pretty much nothing positive in the picture the BBC article paints of them. And that takes us back to Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, and her pledge that if the Conservatives win the next election (and she becomes Prime Minister), a Trump-style purge of illegal migrants is on the agenda.

The part of "the Global South" that is closest to the United Kingdom is Africa, and so a good number of migrants to the United Kingdom, and also the European Union, come from there. And a good portion of the hostility to them is driven by the idea that they don't bring anything worthwhile with them; they're simply needy people with a penchant for criminality. So for many people, having them around is all cost, and no benefit. And while nothing about the BBC piece comes across as intending to play on the prejudices of Britons, such intent isn't really necessary. The contrast between the partially-named or pseudonymous Nigerians and the Boettlers and Representative Guffey is no less clear for not being deliberate. And yes, Ms. Badenoch and the Conservatives (or the Reform Party, for that matter) can create their own stereotypes, but why pass on work that the BBC has done for them?

In the end, the biggest problem with the piece is that it hinted at a "gotcha" moment, when an intrepid BBC reporter tracks down a sinister extortionist, and confronts them on camera, leads the authorities to them, or both. And that's not an entirely reasonable expectation, after all, Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal was extradited from Nigeria to face five federal charges in connection with Gavin Guffey's extortion and death. Although it must be said that Mr. Lawal didn't know when to quit, and that likely had a lot to do with his being tracked down. (Not to mention the fact that if convicted, he'll be well into middle age by the time he completes even the minimum possible sentence.)

But perhaps a story on how to protect one's loved ones, or oneself, from these schemes would have been more useful. The story's referencing of the various tools available to people being targeted by such schemes comes across as boilerplate, and besides, it's all reactive, rather than proactive, with the BBC placing the sole onus for protection on the providers of online services who have both weak incentives and poor tools to do such work well. "Ola" notes that "young boys are scared of their pictures being released to their class groups, their parents and their friends," and there seems to be a general acceptance of that fact. But young men are always likely to do dumb things when pursuing relationships and sex. Evan Boettler and Gavin Guffey killed themselves because they perceived that being dead was better than being outed as having sent explicit pictures to someone who turned out to be someone other than who they claimed. And the whole scheme works on the presumption that paying ever-escalating amounts of money is preferable to one's friends and family knowing that one's willing to do something dumb in the hope that one gets an attractive girlfriend out of the bargain.

The problem is that there no longer a good way to make the case that part of the problem lies with Anglo-American society without casting people like the Boettlers and Representative Guffey as culpable in the tragedies that have been visited upon them. And this is a common dilemma. Telling people that taking precautions makes it more difficult for perpetrators to act is often seen as casting those people as perpetrators themselves and absolving wrongdoers of culpability. And so there's a singular focus on bad actors; even at the risk of casting entire swaths of humanity as undesirables to be kept away from one's shores.