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Operation Eagle Claw nets 18 Nigerian spammers

More to come say Nigerian scam police

Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is promising to push the country out of the top ten for fraudulent emails thanks to arrests and proactive action to scan all emails.

So far "Operation Eagle Claw" has seen members of 18 syndicates arrested and 800 scam websites shut down. The success was revealed by chairman of the anti-scam force Mrs Farida Waziri speaking in Las Vegas.

Waziri said:

We expect that Eagle Claw as conceived will be 100% operational within six months and at full capacity, it will take Nigeria out of the top 10 list of countries with the highest incidence of fraudulent e-mails.

At the moment, Eagle Claw has delivered the following results:

Over 800 fraudulent e-mail addresses have been identified and shut down. The EFCC is fine tuning security modalities with Microsoft and upon full deployment, the capacity to take down fraudulent e-mails will increase to 5,000 monthly. Further it is projected that advisory mails to be sent to victims and potential victims will be about 230,000 monthly.

There have been 18 arrests of high profile syndicates operating cyber crime organizations.

The Nigerian police are working with Microsoft to fine tune the technology used to check the emails.

Waziri said: "When it is fully deployed, it will afford the EFCC the option of either monitoring or shutting down all fraudulent email addresses. The EFCC would also have identified victims and potential victims and advised them that their email has been compromised.”

Nigeria has become so synonymous with spam crimes that they are known as 419-ers after the relevant section of Nigeria's penal code. ®

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