Fellow Nigerians, this is long but pleaes read.
Last night, 20/20 on ABC supposedly "exposed" Nigerian scammers in the most condescending and biased way. While the greed of the people scammed was acknowledged, it was downplayed to vilify Nigerians. For example, they have a heart surgeon who threw away his life savings over a stupid black money scheme and later had the nerves to talk about how his trust had been violated when he knew the scheme was illegal anyway. They also used a church as an example and said how they were cheated because of their FAITH, when in reality they were cheated out of greed as well. The Western world always paints Africa as poor, but when they hear of a scheme in which they send $40,000 and receive $40 million from Nigeria in response, they fall for it? None of them would donate any money to African countries but they will take as much as they can, which is already going on in the country right now. Watch the videos and read the articles because these were all mentioned in the piece last night.
A piece like that damages Nigerians as a whole. It paints the entire country as scam artists or people who revere scam artists, and the only time they would compliment Nigerians is to say, "They're geniuses at understanding human nature." They referred to the song "I go chop your dollar" by Nkem Owoh as the country's theme and said how Nigerian citizens hail 419 artists as heroes (far from true) even though that song is the soundtrack to a movie and we all know Nigerian movies are based off things that happen there, both the good and bad, but they picked one thing and ran with it. We know that most Nigerians who come here are hard-working and educated and successful and we are the products of that success and carry on our parents' legacy, and we should not watch passively as we are slandered when we are great in number in this country and can respond.
Umu Igbo Alliance in Chicago has drafted a letter demanding a formal apology and we have contact info for ABC, but it would be more effective if we responded in numbers rather than as a few individuals. Any Nigerian organization that you may be involved in, I strongly urge you to take a stand. I've listed contact info at the end:
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2712350
For this link, the first story (after the commercial) should be "Billion Dollar E-mail scams." Then there are like four more clips after that - all part of what 20/20 showed last night.
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2711477
When you watch this video, the story that should come up is "Brian Ross turns the table on e-mail scammers." After that, click on "Brian Ross with an inside look at a con artist at work." Those are two clips from last night.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/..._of_chels.html
This link is a story that they covered last night.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...es_minist.html
This link is another story coverd last night.
Honestly, these scams are not genius. The people that fell for it were just greedy and foolish. $25,000 for like $20 million? Please.
Contact info:
Contact 20/20 at:
2020@abc.com
Or go to:
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/BrianRoss/ and go to “Ask Brian Ross, then click on “email Brian Ross your questions”
Letters can also be sent to:
ABC News 7 WEST 66th Street
New York, NY 10023
They also ask for feedback via camcorder or webcam and they may air that as well so that is an option that people could try as well. I am tired of Nigerians being portrayed negatively as a whole when those are individuals, not all of us, and we should respond and express our dissatisfaction.