New Scams on the Web | France 2 | Envoyé Spécial

Who has not received spam mail in their inbox telling them they are the lucky winners of a fabulous sum, but that you need to pay out a few hundred euros before you can get it? Or a mail from a young and beautiful stranger who promises you love… but who also asks you for money? The majority of these mails come from the Ivory Coast. They are from swindlers who operate from web-cafés so as to avoid detection. For them, these scams have become a real and very profitable business. In the Ivory Coast they call it grazing”. The phenomenon has ballooned over the last two years with a new generation of young Ivorians, skilled in IT, who have massively chosen fraud as a source of income. They now number thousands and they almost exclusively attack Europeans, the most profitable targets. With fake promises of gain, fake love letters, these fraudsters make a lot of money. In the Ivory Coast the average salary is 300 Euros per month, but the swindlers can make as much as several thousands of Euros! The victims can lose several tens of thousands of Euros. Ruined, manipulated and humiliated, those who are swindled find themselves in a financially difficult position and often fall into excessive debt. Many of them find it hard to get the law to recognise them as victims.

“