Spiders on the World Wide Web: cyber trickery and gender fraud among youth in an Accra zongo

Identity Expression—the Case of ‘Sakawa’ Boys in Ghana

“…Therefore, female scammers with names such as Hawa, Salma, Ni'mah and Zainab in orthodox Muslim Zongo communities as revealed in Cassiman study in Nima and Accra, transgress the moral standard of womanhood and may find it difficult in settling down in marriage (Cassiman, 2019, p. 494). Cassiman's (2018Cassiman's ( , 2019 conclusions are worth noting. Her studies confirm that the readiness of Sakawa boys to cede their roles in online dating scams to girls to ingeniously execute a grand scheme in cybercrime challenges gender relations and norms.…”

“…While Warner claimed that about 90% of Internet scammers in Ghana are made up of men (2011, p.740), it is difficult to obtain an accurate data of young women in Internet scamming in the country, partly because of the moral standards society sets for women, in terms of virtue and proper character for prospective brides. Cassiman's (2019) research revealed interesting findings on how gender is implicated in Internet scams in the Zongo communities, as young girls and women participate in Internet scams through online dating (Cassiman, 2018(Cassiman, , 2019. Generally, the type of gender fraud that prevails in the cybercrime business in Ghana is online dating or friendship scam.…”

“…Scammers recruit female accomplices to take over in front of webcams and answer phone calls when it requires face-to-face contact with targets (Cassiman, 2019;Warner, 2011). It must be noted that employing the services of females, as Cassiman (2019) revealed, entails utmost trust and confidentiality, as every secret and detail of the grand plot, including previous interactions with the victims, should be shared.…”

“…For one thing, it challenges the age-old stereotype that men are smart, cunning, and tricky. For another thing, the female browser or scammer who appears witty in cyberspace is not only transgressing gender norms but also falls short as a complete virtuous woman for marriage (Cassiman, 2019). Being cunning and skilful in fraud poses challenges in finding suitable suitors; '[t]rickery skills seem to condemn young women to the status of [young girls or ladies who participate in scams] and are believed to affect the femininity, piety, and decency of aspiring brides and wives' (Cassiman, 2019, p. 496 [emphasis added]).…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…Inclined as we might be to assume that fraudulence and fakery have become more prominent, à la Bernie Madoff (Ortner 2019), as a symptom of moral decay, or because discoveries of fraud have become more frequent in the wake of global financial collapse, the authors assert that fraud’s prominence marks the increasing difficulties in attributing trustworthiness and genuineness in an increasingly complex and ethically conflicted global context. A model (and probably mythical) soldier used as the subject of a Maoist propaganda process, called xuanchan – meaning ‘announce’ ( xuan ) and ‘transmit’ ( chuan ) (Gao and Bischoping 2019); a financial sleight‐of‐hand scheme that purports to ‘double’ people’s money in Sierra Leone (Bürge 2019); an online dating scam in Ghana which deploys some of the tactics and characteristics of the (anthropologically) celebrated ‘trickster’ figure (Cassiman 2019); a multi‐level (pyramid) marketing scheme linked to Pentecostalism, which promises but never delivers wealth and prosperity (Beek 2019): all of these evidence the presence and purchase of deception and trickery across a range of societies and social discourses – not exclusively, or perhaps even primarily, financial. The history of a fabricated identity traced beyond its passage over the border into a polity where identity and provenance are subject to an unrelenting regime of surveillance (Le Courant 2019); the rise of ‘petty sovereigns’ and how they interact with so‐called ‘irregular’ migrants at pinch‐points at the border and beyond (Bendixsen 2019); the shifting (and indeed shifty) processes and criteria applied to the evaluation of ‘reconciliation’ in the aftermath of bloody, genocidal, civil conflict: all of these indicate the emergence of flexible and mobile systems of authentication and verification – of audit, if you will, surely one of the overarching and defining features of global post‐modernity.…”