The Netherlands is musing on proposals for a special police unit to tackle Nigerian criminal gangs. Investigative reporter EMMANUEL MAYAH travels there and meets a cell leader and other Nigerian career criminals waging an aggressive economic war against Europe.
Some call it economic terrorism. But one crook, beating his chest, calls it a pay back for historical wrongs.
The streets of Amsterdam.
A few streets off bustling Amsterdam Central is a posh bar curiously named Lost in Amsterdam. The neon sign does not say much. But it takes just a few minutes for the ambivalence of this leisure spot, which targets tourists and resident rich Africans, to sink in.
It is the night out for a gregarious group of Nigerians, almost all of whom walk with impunity in their footsteps. Normally, their boisterous nature would annoy an average Dutch audience, but soon it begins to get clear why this bunch of West Africans is always tolerated here.
In a little over two hours the group of six men, including this undercover reporter, burns cash in excess of 4,000 euros. The last bottle of wine is not even finished when the others move to another part of the city to continue the spending spree.
In pursuit of the good life, they chase after women, habitually writing telephone numbers on euro bills before handing them to the women of their desire.
One of the men jokes that it makes no sense carrying a business card. “Cash is my business … besides, using euros as my memo pads is the best first impression.”
Not only have these Nigerians, members of an underworld, conquered different women, they have also conquered different parts of Europe.
They have sojourned in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Spain and Sweden – swindling banks, raking in millions of euros, in an offensive described as economic terrorism.
Two of them had been in prison elsewhere before settling in the Netherlands…
Four years ago, while working undercover on a human trafficking and illegal migration story, this reporter had been referred by his “travel agent” to a cybercafe opposite the public library in Isolo, Lagos where prospective emigrees were, for a fee, taught skills in computer crime, basically to prepare them for a life in Europe.
At this shadowy academy, this reporter met 26-year-old Femi (not his real name). Called Femishow by his friends, he was one of the Nigerians drinking alcoholic milkshakes at the pricey “Lost in Amsterdam” in the Nieuwendijk area of the city.
Happy to hook up with a former ‘classmate’, Femishow gave a narrative of his journey to Europe.
When he arrived Schipol Airport in 2010, he was arrested for possessing no travel documents.
Femishow had acquired a Guinean passport in Lagos. With the fake passport, he travelled to Ghana where someone helped him to procure a visa for N700,000. Aboard the flight to Amsterdam, he made his way to the toilet and destroyed his documents.
He arrived the Netherlands without a nationality. Although the Dutch police knew he was a Nigerian, they could not prove it.
Femishow was imprisoned for four months. Upon his release, he was asked the standard question: “Do you wish to return to your country?” He was ready with his answer: No.
He was taken to a detention centre in Schipol for a month. From there he visited the asylum application centre also in Schipol. After several interviews, he was taken to an asylum camp in Dronten. Five months later, his asylum request was turned down, his stay in Holland officially terminated.
Rejected asylum seekers are left stranded on the cold streets. Without legal documents, they can neither get jobs nor easily move on to another country. Not Femishow. He had his friends waiting for him.
While at the camp, he was given free language coaching. With his smattering Dutch, he was prepared for the life ahead. Most of the Nigerian illegals take to crime, often drug peddling, to survive.
In May 2009, while trying to escape the Dutch police, one Azubuike jumped from the 9th floor of his apartment building in Bijlmer, southeast Amsterdam. His death sparked a protest against police high-handedness by the black community in Amsterdam.
Black Amsterdam
In Amsterdam, this reporter’s white friends warned him not to go to Bijlmer, a predominantly black neighbourhood. This place is the Hillbrow of Johannesburg or the Mushin of Lagos. This is where Femishow lives.
Bijlmermeer, ‘Bijlmer’ for short, or ‘the Bimmer’ for those in the know, is synonymous with crime, drugs, unemployment and illegal immigrants. It is home to 100,000 people of 150 different nationalities, mostly from Africa, and the former Dutch colonies of Suriname and Antilles.
Walking around, you see different faces of Nigerians, Surinamese and Somalis. You encounter a street market retailing garri, egusi, plantain, coconut, pepper and other foods from immigrants’ homelands. Reggae, salsa and Nigerian music rule the air.
There is no doubt who runs Bijlmer: Nigerians. They are loud wherever two or three of them gather. Other nationalities defer to Nigerians, who lounge around with beautiful Surinamese girls by their side and act as though they invented the automated teller machine (ATM).
Young men work as ‘look-outs’ and foot soldiers as money quickly changes hands on street corners. Bijlmer has an underbelly, and it shows. A police chief once described this notorious district ruled by Nigerians as a “national disaster area.”
In search of solution to the menace, a call was recently made for the establishment of a special police unit to handle Nigerian-related crimes.
Three parties in the Dutch parliament, the Christian Democrats, the conservative VVD and the populist Freedom Party, jointly proposed to the justice minister to create a permanent police unit to tackle Nigerian criminal gangs.
Outside Nigeria, the Netherlands is said to host the largest community of Nigerian fraudsters, especially internet scammers. Back in Nigeria, at the various backstreet fraud classes, where most youngsters learn the rope, the Netherlands is the destination choice for greenhorn crooks preparing to migrate to Europe.
Figures published in 2006 by Ultrascan, a Dutch private detective company, said there were over 800 suspected Nigerian fraudsters described as “hardcore scammers” working from the Netherlands.
The UK was second with 724 scammers, followed by Spain with over 500.
Aside hardcore scammers, “at least 1,400 Nigerians in Holland alone were involved with this type of scam,” Ultrascan added, to underscore the fact that the Netherlands was the hotbed for Nigerian con artists.
In 2006, Dutch authorities arrested 12 Nigerians, confisticating computers, fake travel documents and 25,000 euros in cash.
In a separate arrest, a quartet of Nigerian scammers in the Netherlands who had bilked mostly American citizens of more than $1.2 million (according to the United States Justice Department) were arrested and extradited to the U.S.
In March 2010, another Nigerian, Ugochukwu Enwerem, who collected over $9.5 million from victims, was convicted by a federal jury in North Carolina. He tricked them to wire money to him and his designees in the Netherlands.
Sophos, an anti-fraud coalition, said: “Over the last couple of years, we have seen more 419 solicitations with Dutch phone numbers than those of any other nation, including Nigeria, though the Dutch-based fraudsters are of course Nigerians operating primarily from Amsterdam.”
The term 419, a Nigerian penal code, also called advance fee fraud, is a Nigerian criminal patent and virus spread by virulent migrants across the world.
In terms of organisational structures, criminal enterprise and collateral damages, the Nigerian 419 groups are now comparable to Colombia drug barons and the Russian mafia.
Years back, a few Nigerian scammers brought down a Brazilian bank, Banco Noroeste, after one of its directors, Nelson Sakaguchi, wired a total of $243 million to the Nigerians. The scam, recorded as the third biggest in banking history, led to at least two murders.
A night out with the gang
Throughout the evening this undercover reporter was with the Nigerian fraudsters in Amsterdam, conversations and telephone discussions were carried out in lingo. They discussed activities of rival criminal cells in Amsterdam, Hilversum, De Hague, Rotterdam and across the border in Brussels.
They debated latest information from their intelligence network and plotted revenge on turncoats found snitching.
As the night wore on, and alcohol began to inflate egos, conversations became boastful and inevitably centred on associates who recently made a killing. One of the “hit men” is a Nigerian called Olu who came to Holland a refugee.
Known by multiple aliases in the cybercrime world, he returned to Nigeria a few years ago and built an eye-catching hotel in the Papa Ajao area of Mushin, Lagos.
Olu owns a country home equipped with a swimming pool and a tennis court in his native Ekiti State.
Early this year, he acquired and re-modelled a massive event centre in Lagos, equipped with 40 units of air conditioners. He added a mini-Disney playground for children. He also owns a clinic and moves about town in a convoy of exotic cars.
It is well known that a good number of Nigerian fraudsters rose from humble refugee status to become instant millionaires in the Netherlands.
Olu is estimated to worth over N2 billion, yet he is not considered one of the richest.
Nigerian fraudsters invented or modified popular fraud ploys like the Advance Fee Fraud, Red Mercury Scam, credit card fraud, lottery scam, solid mineral scam, the rich widow scam and God-knows-what-else.
But some of them made fortunes by attacking financial institutions in the Netherlands.
One of the most talked-about cases in Nigerian underworld discourse involved the Dutch bank, ABN AMRO. A Nigerian involved in the serial heist that climaxed in 2005 disclosed that his own cell defrauded the bank of 5.2 million euros before the game was up.
A Dutch investigative journalist, Anneke Verbraeken, believed that ABN AMRO lost much more than what was made public. She said crimes of such nature are hardly talked about because often times victims choose to remain silent and banks would not cry out either, not to shatter depositors’ confidence.
Investigations conducted in the Netherlands and neighbouring Belgium revealed that the Nigerians took time to weave an intricate web. Recruitment of members of the fraud gang began early at the asylum reception centre in Ter Apel.
At least that was where one of the Nigerians made the acquaintance of a Surinamese who would be offered employment years later by ABN AMRO.
While the technical details remain obscure, the Nigerians basically used the Surinamese insider knowledge and complicity to open dozens of bank accounts using fictitious names and forged documents.
Usually, they met outside the bank. The Surinamese supplied the information on new banking schemes the gang could take advantage of. The Nigerians rarely visited the bank premises. Documents for setting up new accounts, including passports, were supplied to the Surinamese at their meeting place.
Ordinarily, when a client presents a document like a passport to a bank, the bank verifies it, makes copies and returns the original to the client.
Because all the documents the Nigerians supplied, including job guarantees with fat salary contracts, were forged, they supplied only photocopies to the Surinamese who took them to his office and passed them on as papers he had treated.
When his supervisors demanded that certain information be cross-checked with certain employers, to verify if a prospective account owner actually worked with an organisation or earned the salary stated in his contract, the Surinamese reported back that he had done so.
Once an account was opened, the fraudsters applied for loans which they did not intend to repay. Then they just sat back and watched the loans roll in from dozens of accounts.
To obtain fatter loans, the same process was employed to open business accounts with the crooks claiming to be business owners taking out loans to finance the next profitable venture.
No one can really say how long the Nigerian-Surinamese scheme had been running before the crooks were found out.
Reluctantly but quietly the bank went to court. But it was difficult deciding how best to handle a bunch of Nigerians with doubtful identities who, for all intents and purposes, were ghost customers.
The majority of “bank passes” used in opening the accounts were traced to refugees denied asylum in the Netherlands who swapped them with the Nigerian syndicate for a token.
The prosecution applied the screw on the Surinamese hoping to get to the Nigerians through him. Four Nigerians were initially taken in but the prosecution had a tough time in the face of weak evidence.
Lawyers to the Surinamese argued that, like the bank, he was a victim of the hypnotic powers of diabolical Nigerians. He has been fired by his employers, but the judgment against him is currently on appeal.
Refugees enjoy many rights in the asylum camp. Bank accounts are opened for them through which they receive monthly stipends for their welfare from the Dutch government. For the many who are eventually refused stay, the Nigerian frausters solicit and buy their bank documents to clone hundreds of identities.
Femishow disclosed that the Dutch do not trust Nigerians but trust Surinamese, their former colonial servants; therefore, Nigerians find a dozen ways to co-opt and compromise Surinamese, often by first winning the love and confidence of their women.
Playing Robin Hood
Asked what he did with his share of the AMRO BANK bounty, one of the Nigerians involved in the cyber heist boasted that he returned home to a hero’s welcome. He built a big house, bought stocks and invested in sand-dredging equipment.
He bankrolled the production of a Nollywood movie and even flew some of the cast to Amsterdam to shoot scenes. Through that, he made the acquaintance of his dream girl, a popular Nollywood actress.
Meanwhile, one of his unforgettable moments was the day he played Robin Hood. The incident happened at the Rotterdam train station.
A woman in obvious distress bumped into him. She mumbled her apologies with tearful eyes. The kind crook was so concerned he went after her, wanting to be assured she would be okay.
Touched by his show of concern, the woman spilled it all, including the family and financial problems weighing down on her.
The Nigerian reached inside his jacket and pulled out 3,500 euros, handed it to the stranger and left in the opposite direction. Now, it was her turn to run after him, demanding for his phone number.
Aside ABN AMRO, other banks known to have lost money to Nigerian syndicates include P&T Luxembourg, Piraeus Bank Greece, HSBC, Societe Generale, Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank (Cyprus).
The syndicates somehow managed to circumvent banking regulations to plunder savings, pensions, credit cards, loans and insurance.
Road trip to Belgium
Posing as a fledgling fraudster who needed help to pull off a big scam, Femishow had accompanied this reporter on a road trip to Antwep and Brussels to meet a Nigerian godfather who controlled one criminal cell each on both sides of the border with the Netherlands.
The Nigerian, by the name Olu (not his real name), networks with both West African and European underworld gangs. His tentacles reach Italy, Spain; and unlikely places such as Luxembourg.
Olu has expertise in everything, from shipping items to registering an offshore company, money transfer, to money laundering. He boasted that he had people in the right places to transfer money to anywhere on the face of the earth.
He started his money laundering business in the early 1990s, beginning with links with elements in the Nigerian army. This was when Major General, who is now dead, headed the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA).
Proceeds of crime, including drugs and advance fee fraud, were used to buy trucks, pharmaceuticals, computers, exotic cars and agricultural equipment. Shipped from Belgium to Nigeria, the boys from the army were always at the Lagos port to facilitate smooth and quick delivery.
It was discovered from interactions with several Nigerians that even in the 1990s, Dutch banks were inevitably the first targets for young criminals in need of small but easy money.
Olu recalled that at the time banks offered various incentives to attract customers. One was an instant credit line of 1,000 Dutch guilders on any new account. Every new account was entitled to the overdraft, which was repayable in small percentages from the regular income of the account holder.
Nigerians employed fraudulent means to open as many bank accounts as possible. They harvested 1,000 guilders on each and abandoned the accounts to open yet another set, using fake identities.
With the introduction of the Euro zone, the Nigerians moved on to yet another insidious scheme. When internet banking was not yet sophisticated, they devised a means to steal 3,000 euros at a time from Dutch banks.
First, they opened an account depositing 3,000 euros. Because the ATM could only allow a maximum withdrawal of 1,000 euros a day, they waited for weekends to strike.
They withdrew 1,000 euros late on a Friday, crossed the border to Belgium and withdrew another 1,000 euros on Saturday, then another 1,000 euros on Sunday.
Because these weekend withdrawals took till Monday to reflect, the Nigerians raced back to the Netherlands on Sunday. Very early on Monday morning, they were the first at the bank where they used not the ATM this time but their passbook to pull out their original 3,000 euros.
With fake documents and fake identities the cycle was repeated every weekend.
Plundering Dutch pension
Besides Dutch citizens falling prey to credit card fraud or advance fee scam, one group that has proved an easy target for Nigerian criminals in the Netherlands is Dutch pensioners.
The syndicates employed foot soldiers to watch the homes of retirees. Using master keys they raided mailboxes to steal bank statements. Next, they cloned the identity of the pensioner. Posing as the account holder, they applied to the bank for online banking, using the victim’s personal data.
Online banking solves all the problems since a young black African cannot physically impersonate an old white man or woman; not even with the best make-up.
The criminals worked as a team; the foot soldiers stole the documents and those who could read and write Dutch handled the cloning and correspondence. They changed the address of the pensioner as well as any other things necessary to cut the retiree off his account.
Once they ascertained the savings in an account they went on to wreck it, making purchases online.
After about 11,000 pensioners were robbed, the Dutch police two years ago took to delivering mail in sting operations in areas worst hit. Cameras were also set up in strategic locations.
It paid off with a good number of the mail thieves nabbed across the country. There was a lull, with the crooks beating a retreat to Belgium. But some of them are now back, devising day and night new ways to remain one step ahead of the law.
Yet another way Nigerians fleece banks in Europe is through cheque kitting. Using stolen identities, a Nigerian, for example, Dotun, opens cheque accounts at bank A and bank B.
He deposits 500 euros in Bank A and 0 euros in Bank B. He then writes a 100,000 euros cheque on his account in Bank A and deposits it in Bank B. Bank B, unaware that Dotun has insufficient funds in his account in Bank A, gives him immediate credit on his account.
During the three business days it takes Bank B to clear the cheque on his account in Bank A, Dotun writes a 100,000 euros cheque on his account in Bank B and deposits it in Bank A to cover his first 100,000 euros cheque.
Bank A immediately gives him credit on his account, and Bank B clears Dotun’s first 100,000 euros cheque.
He continues writing bad cheques between his accounts for a safe period before he moves on to another bank with another stolen identity.
The Chinese connection
Scams recently pulled off in the Netherlands strongly suggest the collaborations of Nigerian criminals with the Chinese mafia. One is in the area of cheque fraud.
Traditionally, Nigerians operate by hiding their real identity and location, using fake names and fake postal addresses, as well as communicating via anonymous free email accounts and mobile phones.
Victims have received unsolicited emails from companies, often claiming to be in China, looking for representatives to establish a business presence in the Netherlands or in other parts of Europe and for payments transfer.
Recipients of such emails are typically promised 10 per cent of those transfers from customers.
In reality, this is a cheque fraud that can work on a massive scale, causing damages of thousands to hundreds of thousands of euros. In some cases, names of legitimate companies are used for the scam. In other cases, the companies are non-existent.
The scammers are really not Chinese; they are not even Asians but Nigerians. They mail their “representative” fake cheques from phantom customers to deposit in the representative’s personal or business accounts. Often these are written on blank cheque forms stolen from legitimate businesses.
Provided the business whose cheque is stolen has sufficient funds in its account, the cheque will initially clear. It usually takes about a month for the cheque to bounce; this happens when the company whose cheque was stolen receives the deposited cheque it never wrote.
Before this the cheque clears the unsuspecting representative wires the amount to a bank account in another country; often Japan, Taiwan, China or the UK. By the time the fake cheque bounces the money is already out of the Netherlands or Europe, leaving the victim wondering what has hit him.
Nigerian fraudsters also target unlikely businesses such as art galleries.
Someone is interested in your artwork and wants it shipped overseas. Unknown to the gallery, the client has just paid with a fake credit card or fake certified U.S. bank cheque. But that is not even the problem.
The real problem is that for some reasons the rich client has paid the gallery in excess of the tag on the artwork. Being a decent person, the gallery owner does not refuse the customer’s request that the difference be wired back to him through Western Union. The cheque will turn out to be dude; by which time the gallery has lost a decent amount.
In 2007, a popular Nigerian movie actor, Nkem Owoh, was arrested in Amsterdam while performing at a concert. He was known for performing the song, I go chop your dollar. The song was featured in a controversial movie The Master in which Owoh plays a fraudster.
Over 200 Nigerians were reportedly arrested by the Dutch police who stormed the concert venue in a helicopter.
Nigeria’s anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NCC) had banned the song prior to the Amsterdam concert.
I go chop your dollar is a tribute to Nigerian advance fee fraudsters who have a robust scam industry and harvest millions of dollars yearly from victims in Europe, America, Australia and Asia.
Some of the victims include a former U.S. Congressman Ed Mezvinsky who, having bought into a dodgy business proposition, was made to travel to Nigeria several times to meet his ‘business partners’ and ultimately lost over $3 million.
The Washington politician did not only bag a seven-year jail sentence in his country, his son, Marc Mezvinsky, lost the chance to marry his heartthrob, Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former American President, Bill Clinton.
Not a few scam victims have committed suicide.
• In 2006, an American living in South Africa hanged himself after falling victim to 419.
• Kjetil Moe, a Norwegian businessman, was reported missing and eventually found dead in South Africa after an encounter with Nigerian scammers in Johannesburg.
The four Nigerians arrested in the Netherlands and extradited to face justice in the U.S. were
• Nnamdi Chizuba Anisiobi (of multiple aliases: Yellowman, Abdul Rahman, Michael Anderson, Edmund Walter, Helmut Schkinger, Nancy White, Jiggaman, and Namo);
• Anthony Friday Ehis (also known as John J. Smith, Toni N. Amokwu and Mr. T).
• Kesandu Egwuonwu (aka KeKe, Joey Martin Maxwell, David Mark).
• John Doe 1 (aka Eric Williams, Lee, Chucks and Nago).
To fleece their victims, they posed as throat-cancer patients living in the Southeast Asian nation of Brunei. Each said he was too ill to distribute his wealth of $55 million to charity and needed help.
They promised their victims a share of a large inheritance but requested payment of a variety of advance fees for legal representation, taxes and documentation.
After the victims had wire-transferred funds to pay the required fees, correspondence ceased. The victims lost more than $1.2 million.
Just as the Nigerian underworld abroad collaborates with Chinese, corrupt officials at home team up with unscrupulous Dutch businessmen to defraud the Nigerian government.
Shortly before the call for bid for the sale of Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL), a Dutch company, Pentascope, was hurriedly put together.
It was registered on a public holiday, January 1, 2002. From the Netherlands in 2003 suddenly came Pentascope, emerging the preferred bidder for NITEL.
By April 2004, when Pentascope was stripped of the contract within one year, it had itself stripped NITEL of about N100 billion.
When a team of NITEL directors travelled to the Netherlands to verify the claims put forward by Nigeria’s Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm of auditors that was supposed to have done the due diligence on the Dutch firm, they were stunned by their discoveries.
Pentascope had only seven staff, a janitor, and operated from an abandoned old church building.
Olu pointed at Pentascope and Shell to support his argument that beautiful cities like Amsterdam were developed with wealth stolen from Africa. “We are here to take some of it back. For them to stop us, they must first stop their own people. Fair is fair. I call it tit-for-tat good neighbourliness,” he said.
When this reporter visited the Nigerian embassy at The Hague, the Ambassador, Nimota Akanbi, maintained that there are many decent Nigerians doing well in different professions in the Netherlands.
She, however, regretted the activities of a few bent on sullying the country’s image. She reiterated the embassy’s preparedness to assist Nigerian illegals with travel documents to return home.
The frustration and helplessness with Nigerian fraudsters is written all over the Dutch community. A popular T-shirt laments: “My money went to Nigeria and all I got is this lousy T-shirt.”