Ole Martin Ellingboe Nilsen Assignment 2

Sociology 167 – Virtual communities & social media: Assignment 2 (virtual crimes)
Ole Martin Ellingboe Nilsen
U.C. Berkeley, fall 2013.

July, 2013: A Nigerian citizen and his Mumbai accomplice have been arrested in Mumbai, India for scamming an Indian businessman $240.000. The scam artist sent out emails, calling for financial partnership in an oil preparation business deal. The victim took the bait and responded to the proposal. The victim was later asked to deposit his “share” throughout different bank accounts in Mumbai. Eventually, the police tracked down the criminals by tracing the mobile phone towers the scammer used when contacting their victim. They confessed to the crime.
The article describes an incident of online crime where the offender and the victim had no personal, real-world, relationship to start off with. This type of fraud could be motivated by dissociative anonymity. Dissociative anonymity is a type of disinhibition where the participants involved hides behind aliases or fake names.  They want to hide their full identity, as well as their body language – which is the best indicator of whether someone is lying or not. This subjective sense of (partial) anonymity is enough to drive people to do things online which they would never have done in real life. This means that stealing money from people online is easier on you consciousness than doing the same thing face-to-face. You basically separate your online actions from the rest of your life. Thus, your actions cause little or no consequences to you. As in the case previously discussed, Nigerian actor Nkem Owoh states this well in his 2005 hit song “I Go Chop Your Dollar”, with the lyric equal to “419 scams is just a game: The scammer is the winner, the victim is the loser”.

References:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/nigerian-held-in-mumbai-in-internet-fraud-case/article4866420.ece (Retrieved on October 1^st 2013).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cGCJEh02MI (Retrieved on October 1^st 2013).
Suler, John (2004). "The Online Disinhibition Effect". Cyber-Psychology & Behavior 7 (3): 321–326. [Retrieved from: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/1094931041291295 On October 1^st 2013].