All you need to know why the youth of Tamale are involved in scamming and its my dream to help them stop it for a better future for the youth in my region,Ghana and the world.

1. IN THE NAME OF REVENGE- THE MENTALITY OF
THE YOUTH OF TAMALE GETTING REVENGE ON
THE WHITES
BY: KUUPOLE ERUBAAR EWALD
ABSTRACT
The age of powerful computers, fast internet and tricks to outsmart servers and people are
becoming a problem to the innocent users all over the globe. Every day I ask myself what is the
purpose of this scamming game the youth of Tamale is playing? The answer I get is “REVENGE
on the whites for what they did to our fore fathers”.

2. INTRODUCTION
Here, I ask myself what do they mean by revenge? I did some research on the said revenge and
my findings was so shocking. Before I begin George R.R., Martin quotes “I will hurt you for
this. I don't know how yet, but give me time. A day will come when you think yourself safe and
happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth, and you'll know the debt is paid.”
Again, the definition of revenge is “the action of inflicting hurt or harm on someone for an injury
or wrong suffered at their hands” Wikipedia defines SAKAWA “is believed to be a Ghanaian
term for illegal practices which combine modern Internet-based fraud with fetish rituals. The
rituals, which are mostly in the form of sacrifices, are intended to spiritually manipulate victims
so that the scammer's fraud is successful. The term Sakawa initially referred to specific online
scams but has since broadened to include all types of online frauds and scams mainly targeting
foreigners. The scammers flaunt stylish clothes, luxury cars, and enormous wealth, in order to
promote this act. In impoverished areas, it can be seen as a way of survival for some” so this is
more like a cyber fraud with the addition of voodoo charms to manipulate their victims to fall for
their demands.
Google defines internet fraud as the use of Internet services or software with Internet access to
defraud victims or to otherwise take advantage of them. Internet crime schemes steal millions of
dollars each year from victims and continue to plague the Internet through various methods.

3. Tamale is Ghana's fourth-largest city. It has a 2013 projected population of 360,579 according to
the 2010 census]
and is the fastest-growing city in West Africa. The town is located 600 km
(370 mi) north of Accra. Most residents of Tamale are Muslims, as reflected by the multitude of
mosques in Tamale, most notably the Central Mosque. The Sunnis and the Ahmadiyya’s also
have their own central mosques, north of the town Center along the Bolgatanga Road.
LOCATION OF TAMALE ON THE GHANA MAP:
Let’s go down memory lane to know something about the slave trade that happened many years
ago which has resolved to this,
TAMALE

4. THE GOLD COAST SLAVE TRADE:
The earliest Portuguese traders on the coast were seeking to outflank Europe’s traditional
suppliers of gold from the region, the trans-Saharan caravans. There was also a ready supply of
human captives available for trade. Although by the middle of the sixteenth century, the market
for slaves was waning in Europe, it was booming in Portugal’s new island colonies off the
African Coast – the Cape Verdes and São Tomé – and in Brazil, which by 1600 was a major
slave importer. The pace of colonization in the Caribbean and the Americas soon became so fast,
and the demand for slaves to work the plantations so great, that Dutch and English, together with
a few French, Danish, Swedish and even Prussian traders, soon came to fulfill a trans-Atlantic
demand that the Portuguese alone were unable to meet. The Gold Coast slave trade was one
segment, perhaps a tenth, of an African trade that also featured Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the
“Windward Coast” (present-day Liberia), the “Slave Coast” (present day Porto Novo to Lagos),
the Niger Delta and Cameroons, the Congo and Angola.
In 1700, the population of what is now Ghana is estimated to have been about one million.
During the course of the eighteenth century, the numbers of slaves from the Gold Coast forts
sold into the Middle Passage (the central leg of the Europe–Africa–Americas–Europe trading
triangle), rose from around 2,000 a year to perhaps 10,000, with up to two out of three being men
and boys aged between 8 and 20. The majority of Gold Coast slaves were deported to the

5. Caribbean, where they worked for the rest of their lives on British, Dutch, French or Spanish
sugar plantations. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, there were relatively few slaves in
the North American colonies. But by 1750, Charleston and other ports were starting to buy
African slaves from Caribbean traders. By the end of the eighteenth century, the USA was
importing slaves directly, to work the cotton and tobacco fields supplying European factories.
It is estimated that for every 100 slaves who survived the crossing, 50 to 100 died, perishing
during capture, while on the overland trek to the coast, while awaiting shipment in the dungeons,
or at sea. The impact of removing so many of the fittest and most able young people – perhaps
averaging ten percent each year from affected communities – was devastating, akin to a
pandemic: every family suffered direct consequences as husbands, brothers and sons, as well as
wives, sisters and daughters, were captured or disappeared. The population in the Gold Coast,
which had been increasing by forty percent each century, hardly changed for more than 100
years. The best available estimate is that around a million slaves were transported from the Gold
Coast to the Americas between 1600 and the mid-nineteenth century, when the (by then illegal)
trade finally dried up.
Some slaves were convicts, others were kidnapped deliberately, but the majority of slaves were
taken from communities destroyed in wars or ruined in the aftermath of conflict – for example

6. during famines when families often pawned children who they were unable to care for to richer
communities. The period of the Asante empire’s greatest military expansion, 1699–1800,
coincided with a period of rapid growth in the American colonies and the start of the industrial
revolution in around 1770 (and the same period saw the deportation of an estimated 700,000
slaves). During this time, the Asante enslaved hundreds of thousands of enemy combatants,
refugees and civilians – especially from truculent vassal states in the Northern, Upper West and
Upper East Regions of present-day Ghana, as well as from further afield in present-day Côte
d’Ivoire, Burkina and Togo – and sold them to Fante middlemen who passed them on to the fort-
based traders, receiving payment largely in firearms, in a spiraling cycle of aggressive
expansionism. The few dozen Fante-speaking Europeans based on the coast virtually never
engaged directly in slave capture, only rarely venturing inland and remaining in the forts to
manage their import-export businesses.
How much the slave trade drove the Asante military machine, and how much it was driven by it,
is hard to say, but the trade itself was certainly driven as much by the African demand for
European goods – cloth, liquor, metal tools, straight cash and especially firearms and gunpowder
– as by the insatiable demand from the Americas for slaves and by the unquenchable appetite of
the European cash economies for sugar and cotton.

7. Down on the coast, captives were canoed through the surf, then herded onto slave ships anchored
offshore, where they sometimes waited months for them to fill. Or they spent long periods in
overcrowded dungeons and holding pens in the forts – or “factories” as the early English traders
called them – run mostly by British or Dutch chartered trading companies, with a mixture of paid
and enslaved local labour. Once embarked on the Middle Passage, a voyage of five to seven
weeks, conditions for slave deportees were grim and terrifying. On their backs, bent forwards, or
paired together to save space, they were shackled in irons, in claustrophobic confinement, for
hours on end. Captains concerned for their cargo’s health – or for reduced losses – brought the
slaves onto the main deck during the day, but in rough weather they were confined between
decks for days at a time. In Britain, the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788 stipulated a space
allowance of 6ft by 1ft 4in (1.8m by 0.4m) for each adult man. But such legal niceties carried
little weight and paled in relation to the reality: washing was rarely possible; excrement
accumulated in the waste tubs; disease spread rapidly; bodies were disposed of overboard; and
punishment beatings and forced feeding were not uncommon.
Although there was undoubtedly public consternation about the slave trade, the business peaked
at a time when the legal rights of Europeans themselves were embryonic in comparison with
today: in Britain, transportation to Australia (effectively as slave labour) was a routine
punishment and burning at the stake still practiced. From the 1760s, reformists lobbied for a ban,

8. but it was the slave revolt on Haiti (1792–1804) that triggered moves toward an end to the trade.
The trading nations, partly sensitized by French revolution and the newly independent United
States of America, partly terrified of what the future might bring if more slave revolts should
occur, steadily turned against the trade. The first Europeans to outlaw the slave trade were the
Danish, in 1804, followed by the British in 1807. Other trading nations followed suit, but it
wasn’t until the British abolition of the institution of slavery itself, in 1833, that the trade began
to decline rapidly, to be replaced by a burgeoning trade in ivory, hides and, later in the nineteenth
century, palm oil for the soap and chemical industries. In the Gold Coast, palm oil was produced
mostly on Asante and Fante palm plantations – worked partly with slave labour.

9. THE GOLD COAST SLAVE TRADE PATTERN:
So, it’s clear that its revenge the youth of Tamale want. It becomes a worry for our future
generations because most of these youth have dropped out of school to scam innocent people of
their wealth and no emotions attached. Ages from 14-35 years both male and women engage in
this act in the name of revenge. The wealth these youth get from fraudulent activities is not used
for any good developments in the region or the city of Tamale but rather for buying luxurious
cars, clothes, organizing expensive parties and prostitutes. I spoke to Mrs. Yvonne Pelig-Gba
who is a teacher in one of the Junior High Schools in Tamale and she said “The pupils don’t

10. come to school like before because they are more focused on getting money than been in school
and because the parents support what they’re doing”. In 2015, a man approached me to teach his
son how to scam and he will pay me GH1000.00.The man said “ Eddie, I want make you teach
my boy how to scam so that he will buy Range Rover soon like my friend’s son has done” I
laughed and I told him “let the boy go to school” back then in 2015 Gh1000.00 would have done
a lot for me but I asked myself am I helping ruin their life’s or am helping in nation building so I
refused the offer so that I can sleep well in the night . Several times I have faced backlash from
people wondering why I am IT inclined and I don’t scam and I tell them I swore an oath to use
IT for good not to hurt people and I am solely against scamming.
Statistics gathered from http://www.lionnelweb.com/blog/top-3-countries-internet-fraud-in-
africa/ .The top 10 countries, according to Internet Crime Complaints Centre (IC3) Report for
2010, are United States of America, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, China, Canada, Malaysia,
Spain, Ghana, Cameroon and Australia. There are 3 African countries in the list, in order of
merit: Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon. With only 5.7% of Internet users in African and Internet
penetration of 11.4% as of March 2011, this report is very disturbing.
It is embarrassing for a country like GHANA to be listed among the top 10 countries in internet
fraud. Where did we go wrong? How did this happen? How do we stop or reduce it? National
Communication Authority – NCA has a big task to curb this pandemic among the youth of

11. Tamale to desist from internet fraud. NCA will have to place sanctions on anybody who uses the
internet, like in China were most websites are blocked and there is a penalty for any internet who
uses it for criminal activities. The National Commission for Civic Education- NCCE in my
opinion would have to work with the NCA to educate and council them again about the level of
damages their activities is imposing on them , the country and the world.
THE SCAM CHAT
How does this scam work? The scammer either pretends to be a woman or a big-time business
mogul and they create a fake account either on Facebook or WhatsApp and upload a fake picture

12. of either a man or woman but mostly they prefer to use military personnel to scam their victim of
their wealth. The scam begins with a romantic conversation which leads to the other party asking
for money from the victim but a situation were by the victim is not falling for their request the
scammer then turns to plan B which is to use voodoo / black magic to manipulate the minds of
the victim to heed to their demands when the victims sends them the huge sum of money mostly
through western union the victim is still under the spell until they finish extorting the money they
need from the victim just like gold mining until the rich mineral is not fully mined they won’t
leave the mining pit. After the victim is gone bankrupt then the spell leaves the victim there he
will realize what he has done by it will be too late.
Another way is the scammer posing a gold dealer or a real estate entrepreneur with the aim of
luring possible rich victims to invest or buy from them, the scammer will produce fake
documents to prove the genuinely of what he is selling to the victim everybody loves gold or
diamonds. The scammer will ask the victim to pay half or make full payments for the gold or the
real estate, when the money is paid they become ghost on the internet they never exist.
In Ghana, Mobile transactions is becoming popular, easier and faster way of sending and
receiving money. Telecommunication giants such as MTN, VODAFONE and AIRTEL-TIGO
have made it easier for Ghanaians to send and receive money conveniently so I will say that’s the
Alipay of Ghana. The designers of this mobile money service have incorporated a key to

13. withdraw and send money for authentication purposes. But there have series of Ghanaian mobile
money users who have fallen prey to scammers who call and scam them huge some of monies so
the question is how secure is our money saved at the bank if our phones are not safe and if
somebody can call me and spoof as the operator of MTN mobile money and ask me to press 1 on
my phone and automatically they see my mobile pin at the scammer’s end and the victims money
is gone. Citi FM online a victim gave his story about how she was swindled of GH¢1, 000 tells
this event occurred when he approached a vendor to send money to a business partner by using
mobile money “Personally, I didn’t think that I could be defrauded but the danger here is we
should all just change our minds because the danger here is that even if they don’t defraud you
physically they can end up defrauding the person you are sending the money to” he said.
“I gave the vendor the number so he did the transaction. Before I even got close to my car the
receiver called me that he has received the money. Later my business partner called again telling
me that after I sent the money to him he had a call from the vendor telling him that in the course
of sending the money in the form of cash, he made a mistake and sent the money in the form of
credit”.
“The vendor told him that for him to be able to resend the money in the form of liquid for him to
be able to take it out, he is going to send him some commands that he’s supposed to approve and
afterwards he is supposed to delete the text message that brought the original cash” he added.

14. Mobile money which hitherto was a safe means of transacting business now seems to be an
opportunity for scammers.
Some of the methods they use include text messages and phone calls. Most often, the scammers
call to inform victims of mistakenly sending some money to their mobile money account and
demand a resend.A Mobile Money vendor at Adabraka who gave his name as Ernest explained
that the scammers look out for unsuspecting people to swindle.
“If it is in the book and we book it, the fraudsters will pretend as if they are coming to do a
transaction and steal the number from the agents’ book. They will have exact details of what you
have done and call back. So, we the mobile money operators have to also be vigilant in our line
of duty. Some will also tell you that they have sent you money in a form of credit and those who
cannot read and write most at times are the culprits” he said.
SOME SUCCESSFUL ARREST MADE BY THE GHANA POLICE SERVICE:
In 2014, Jailed Maurice Asola Fadola charmed vulnerable lonely women during his 'Rom
Con' scam, sending flowers on their birthdays and bombarding them with flattering messages
and poetry. He went on to pose as an American major general to swindle thousands of pounds
from lonely British women he met through online dating sites.
In 2017, Maxwell Peters and Babatunde Martins was arrested for a $10million dollars gold deal
scam in Tamale.

15. In 2017, The Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) has arrested two Ghanaians and a
UK-based accomplice over allegations of trade-based money laundering and romance fraud. The
Suspects were Moro Musah and Sabina Adzre, allegedly operate with UK-based Opoku
Agyeman.
In 2017, Joshua Ekow Sagoe, was arrested by the Police after he turned himself in at the Police
Headquarters after his key accomplice, Adwoa Akumia, a National Service Person who was
posted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was first arrested.
In 2018, twelve suspects, all Nigerians, were in the custody of the New Weija District Police
after they were found in an apartment engaging in a suspicious activity. The Ghana Police
Service examined close to twenty laptops retrieved from the suspected internet fraudsters
In 2018, 22 Nigerians arrested for online fraud in Ghana among the suspects, there was a
Ghanaian taxi driver, believed to have been an accomplice.

16. HOW DO YOU PREVENT THE YOUTH FROM ENGAGING IN SCAMMING?
• Parents should be cautioned and counselled to set good parental goals for their wards.
• China has done a good job by using the Great firewall to block most of the websites
which is a threat to people. The National Communication Authority of Ghana would have
to block sites which are used for this scamming purpose.
• Children should be counselled to and engaged in healthy tasks that will make them better
people to the society and Ghana as a whole, example excursions to the engineering
school or the zoo.
• The Minister of Tamale Metropolitan should establish recreational grounds for the youth
to hang out and the age limitations to enter an internet café or using a sim card should be
implemented.
• Teachers should be steadfast when they see a student doing something suspicious related
to internet fraud. Teachers should serve as role models and counselors in school to advice
these students from indulging in internet fraud.

17. HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM BEEN A VICTIM:
1. Be alert to the fact that scams exist. When dealing with uninvited contacts from people
or businesses, whether it's over the phone, by mail, email, in person or on a social
networking site, always consider the possibility that the approach may be a scam.
Remember, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
2. Know who you're dealing with. If you've only ever met someone online or are unsure of
the legitimacy of a business, take some time to do a bit more research. Do a Google
image search on photos or search the internet for others who may have had dealings with
them. If a message or email comes from a friend and it seems unusual or out of character
for them, contact your friend directly to check that it was really them that sent it.
3. Do not open suspicious texts, pop-up windows or click on links or attachments in
emails – delete them: If unsure, verify the identity of the contact through an independent
source such as a phone book or online search. Don't use the contact details provided in
the message sent to you.
4. Don't respond to phone calls about your computer asking for remote access – hang
up – even if they mention a well-known company such as BUI-POWER. Scammers will
often ask you to turn on your computer to fix a problem or install a free upgrade, which is
actually a virus which will give them your passwords and personal details.
5. Beware of any requests for your details or money. Never send money or give credit
card details, online account details or copies of personal documents to anyone you don’t
know or trust. Don't agree to transfer money or goods for someone else: money
laundering is a criminal offence.

18. 6. Be careful when shopping online. Beware of offers that seem too good to be true, and
always use an online shopping service that you know and trust. Think twice before using
virtual currencies (like Bitcoin) - they do not have the same protections as other
transaction methods, which means you can’t get your money back once you send it.
Visit YouTube to watch some videos about Northern Ghana scammers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o26Eks801oc
REFERENCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakawa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamale,_Ghana
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/revenge
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3018065/china-is-now-blocking-whatsapp-as-well-as-
facebook-and-instagram
http://www.lionnelweb.com/blog/top-3-countries-internet-fraud-in-africa/
https://www.scidev.net/sub-saharan-africa/icts/feature/cybercrime-africa-facts-figures.html
https://www.creditdonkey.com/internet-fraud-statistics.html
https://www.google.com/search?ei=0Y2nW5y0JtCvoASft5vgAg&q=tamale+based+scammers+a
rrested&oq=tamale+based+scammers+arrested&gs_l=psyab.3...477171.482877..483650...0.0..0.
829.3919.5-4j2......0....1..gws-wiz.DgIVOTCRmMs
www.google.com
http://citifmonline.com/2017/10/04/increasing-mobile-money-fraud-scares-ghanaians/
https://www.pulse.ng/gist/metro/ghanaian-police-arrests-22-nigerians-for-online-fraud-id8066085.html
https://www.modernghana.com/news/819927/social-media-fraud-cartel-arrested-in-accra.html
https://www.myjoyonline.com/news/2018/April-4th/police-arrest-12-suspected-internet-fraudsters-at-
weija.php
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/online-dating-fraudster-ghana-scammed-4546717