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You Are Here: Home » Editorials/Opinion » Cyber crime: Giving a bad name to Ghana

Last week, the Information Officer of the United States Embassy in Accra, Mr. Benjamin A. East, handed me a sheet of paper and casually said: “I believe this might be of some interest to you.”

It turned out to be of tremendous interest.

Captioned ‘U.S. retailers block orders from Ghana part of the article read: Afraid of fraud, 30 percent of U.S. e-retailers block orders from Ghana and some other countries. International e-commerce can be risky for U.S. and Canadian merchants, says a new report from payment processor CyberSource Corp. During 2008, 30 percent of merchants that accept international orders online which CyberSource surveyed stopped taking orders from one or more countries because of high levels of fraud.

Seventy-six percent of merchants in that group shut off orders from Nigeria, 58 percent from Ghana, and 32 percent from Pakistan. Other countries blocked in 2008 included Indonesia, 23 percent; Singapore, 19 percent; Romania, 18 percent; China, Russia, and Vietnam at 13 percent each; and South Korea and Hong Kong with 10 percent each.

My interest here is that fraud in international e-commerce is prevalent and Ghana ranks number­ two among the most notorious countries with over half of orders blocked. And given that e-commerce is just about taking off here, with ICT infrastructure development still in its nascent stage, it is alarming that a significant number of our people applying this technology of the future choose to operate on its wrong side.

According to the CyberSource survey, 52 percent of e-merchants accept orders from abroad, accounting for 17 percent of their total sales, and such figures are bound to rise. The report explains that during difficult economic times, such as now, expanding international e-commerce is a logical move for many merchants.

But merchants report that four percent of international orders turn
out to be fraudulent – 3.6 percent times the U.S domestic rate of 1.1 percent, and the international fraud  rate has increased 67 percent since 2005, CyberSource reports.

Ghana’s statistics certainly have, serious implications for the country’s future international commerce – that is, if this trend is allowed to go unchecked.

Tentative beginnings, sophisticated developments

Cyber fraud began to gain prominence at the national level in the 1990s, when trained IT-specialists ­few in number then – swindled unsuspecting foreigners about business opportunities in the country’s precious minerals sector and a few other areas. Foreigners were lured into depositing various sums into dubious accounts, or handing over cash, for the purpose of being supplied gold and diamonds from Ghana.

The supplies, of course, never materialised and the account holders were never traced.

Such fraudsters could however be identified by their acquisition of real estate and very recent models of expensive automobiles.

With the proliferation of cyber cafes in the urban centres, and with increasing numbers of people mastering the use of the internet, cyber fraud escalated – with bait used to lure foreigners widening to include alleged money looted by political leaders who needed help in transferring such moneys out of the country, to women offering themselves for marriage only to vanish after their hooked victims have parted with substantial sums of money.

Over time, the art grew in sophistication. Hotel bellhops colluded with others by passing on credit card information of foreign tourists, which then were used to order goods via the Internet from Europe and North America, to be delivered in Ghana and sold in shops.

Underprivileged suburbs of Accra, such as Kotobaabi, Maamobi and Nima were, and still are, most notorious for this. However, people from middle ­income as well as affluent areas are all engaged in cyber fraud. Youth from the slums flock to the city’s cyber cafes from late night to dawn to ply their trade. Such fraudsters haven’t gotten over their weakness for recent models of SUVs and other flashy cars. The whole process of fraud and its reward has been named ‘sakawa’ in Ghana.

The increasing spate of cyber fraud in the country, naturally, caught the attention of the international community, especially North America and Europe, leading to the blockage of higher numbers of orders from Ghana, as reported in the CyberSource report.

Latest trends, future threats

Of course, Ghanaian ‘sakawa’ has moved a step on. Fraudsters still prize tourists’ credit card information; however, they now have agents in European and North American countries where ordered goods are delivered to their addresses, thus circumventing the blockage of orders originating in Ghana.

Such goods are then re­shipped to Ghana. On the successful shipment of the goods, the fraudsters relocate from the used foreign addresses. And they have increasingly moved away from clothing and lower-priced items to sophisticated electronic products.

‘Sakawa’ is becoming so prevalent it is beginning to have a negative impact on some local businesses. The producers of laptops and retailers of electronic devices are beginning to feel the pinch. ‘Sakawa’ agents offer such items for far less than genuine dealers can offer theirs.

The biggest threat to local business is, however, yet to manifest. In recent times, increasing numbers of entrepreneurs are providing websites for the display and sale of Ghana-made products, especially those that are targetted at the European and American markets, as well as other foreign markets.

It is only a matter of time for ‘sakawa’ to extend its ugly hand to this side as well, only to jeopardise Ghanaian e-exports.

Obviously, conscious and serious measures need to be applied to halt and reverse the growing trend of cyber fraud in the country. The culprits are identifiable. They live in communities, and their modus operandi and their lifestyles easily give them away, and so a better trained police service can deal with them.

Indeed, doing nothing serious to curb this menace may mean that not only will orders from Ghana be blocked by foreign traders, but we could also be shutting ourselves out of future sales to those countries. Given the significance of e­-commerce in future international trade and commerce, it would be suicidal for Ghana to establish a bad reputation for itself in that area.

Credit: Emmanuel Kwablah

Email: ekwablah@bizandbft.biz

Source: B&FT

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