INTRODUCTION
At the start of a cyber fraud case, scammers succeed in telling a believable story:
Mr Gonzales,Footnote 1 a chiropractor from Los Angeles, had received an offer by email to import 200 kg of gold at virtually no cost. A simple woman in a rural village in Ghana, he was told, had inherited the gold. Mr Bano, CEO of Mega Term Mines Ltd, organized the sale and shipment to Mr Gonzales. But the deal had become complicated. More and more official documents were needed and new players emerged. Over the course of a year, Gonzales had transferred more than US$250,000 in fees and kickbacks. Finally, the container arrived in a London warehouse and Gonzales even flew there and touched one of the gold bars. But an envious third party appeared out of nowhere, the second wife of the deceased. She filed an injunction at a Ghanaian court. The container full of gold was sent back. Mr Gonzales then heard about advance fee fraud from West Africa. Desperate but still not totally convinced that everything was untrue, he contacted the Ghanaian police. But even after going to the police, he was still convinced the gold was out there. Talking to the Ghanaian detectives, he told them repeatedly: ‘Look for the gold.’Footnote 2
Advance fee fraud, first and foremost, is storytelling which is sometimes so persuasive that listeners believe parts of these fictions even when they realize that they have been conned. In the case recounted here, everything about the scam story was fictional or factually inaccurate: the people were not who they claimed to be, the company did not exist, all documents were forged, and the supposed gold he touched was metal bars covered in gold-coloured foil. Despite seeing through this in the end, Mr Gonzales continued to believe in the existence of the promised gold. Scamming is storytelling under specific conditions, as the interactions between scammers and victims are transnational and online. Via email, IP phone, instant messaging (IM) and money transfer services, people from different continents and backgrounds can interact with each other more easily than ever before. Scholars in the 1990s were mainly interested in understanding these two social phenomena – the internet and globalization – in general, writing about ‘global flows’ (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996: 33) or the ‘network society’ (Castells Reference Castells1996).Footnote 3 Instead of stating what globalization and the internet are and generating grand theories, anthropologists have begun to further develop how particular actors struggle to give meaning to online communication and transnational connections, and this paper contributes to this endeavour (see Coleman Reference Coleman2010: 489). In the cases I examine, while scamming takes place across continents via new media at first, the actors involved gradually transform the interactions into face-to-face encounters enmeshed in Ghanaian rationalities. While cyber fraud and cyber policing are a quite distinct form of such interactions, researching them enabled me to study how people depend on stories and how fragile the relationship is between stories and social worlds, both on the internet and in a Ghanaian police station.
This article explores criminal investigations of cyber fraud in Ghana by using the framework of storytelling. It treats each fraud case as a series of connected stories, in the beginning told only by the scammers, but later by victims and police officers, who then try to change the direction of the overall narrative. Storytelling is not only at the core of cyber fraud, I argue, but also a key aspect of cyber policing. The article asks how actors rely on, make use of, lose faith in and reinvent stories, first in the context of transnational, online interactions, and later in the context of Ghanaian police work. The stories draw on shared social imaginaries, undermine them or give rise to different ones. The three actor groups – scammers, victims and police officers – work on connected stories but tell competing ones: scammers tell a story about exotic sources of wealth; victims tell about innocence and betrayal; police officers think the story is about getting to the truth and restoring social order. However, under current conditions it has become difficult for all those involved to create believable narratives. All their stories – not only the ones told by scammers – are often factually inaccurate, detached from or inconsistent with their everyday lives.
The research is based on participant observation in the fraud unit of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) headquarters in Accra, a highly specialized unit, and was part of sixteen months of fieldwork on police work in Ghana. I observed the detectives' police work, accompanied them during arrests, and conducted narrative interviews.Footnote 4
Advance fee fraud – also called 419, Nigerian letter or scamming – has predecessors in the late 1800s in the United States. In West Africa, advance fee fraud began in the 1980s in Nigeria, first by mail with forged stamps, then by fax, and later by email (D. J. Smith Reference Smith2008: 30–1). The email from a Nigerian prince has become a widely recognized trope in popular culture, and all internet users have found such emails in their inboxes. Scamming has constantly evolved over the last twenty years, spawning new narratives and using new means of communication. Scammers target not only US nationals and Europeans but increasingly Asians as well. In Ghana, the most common formats – the local term for the specific narrative the scam employs – are currently the gold and romance formats. Scamming, locally called ‘to cyber’ or ‘to browse’, has become a widespread activity among urban youth in West Africa and beyond (Atta-Asamoah Reference Atta-Asamoah2009: 107). The scope of this phenomenon is difficult to ascertain. Some security organizations estimate annual worldwide losses of several billion US dollars, while the government-funded Internet Crime Complaint Center (2012: 9, 16) in the USA reported annual losses of about US$60 million to people taken in by fraudsters corresponding to the profile of West African scammers. The pervasive viewing of foreigners as potential victims became apparent to me when a passer-by in Accra pointed at me and congratulated my Ghanaian companions on managing to bring their ‘client’ here – ‘client’ being the scammers' term for a victim from abroad.
Several scholars have already explored advance fee fraud, mainly by analysing the first emails that scammers send and by studying newspaper reports (see Glickman Reference Glickman2005). Anthropologists and historians recognized early scamming as a fascinating social phenomenon, but these first approaches were more interested in scamming as an example of larger social trends in Africa. In the edited volume Criminalization of the State in Africa, Béatrice Hibou (Reference Hibou, Bayart, Ellis and Hibou1999: 102–3) describes 419 as an example of the recession in the regular economy and the growth of an illicit one; Andrew Apter (Reference Apter, Comaroff and Comaroff1999: 277) writes that scammers exploit ‘the difference between social appearances and realities' but uses this analysis as a vehicle to explore economics and politics of illusion in the Nigerian oil state. Daniel J. Smith (Reference Smith2008: 22) sees 419 – a word that has become a broadly used term in Nigeria for all kinds of immoral behaviour – as part of the Nigerian culture of corruption. However, researchers have rarely attempted to look at the actors involved and the interactions that unfold. Jenna Burrell's (Reference Burrell2012) ethnography of Ghanaian internet cafes is the first to study scamming as a social practice that is interesting in its own right. She argues convincingly that Ghanaians in general use the internet to connect with and persuade foreign others, and that scamming is only the most extreme form of this practice (Burrell Reference Burrell2012: 5; Reference Burrell2008: 19).
Explored within a framework of storytelling, a criminal investigation of cyber fraud consists of up to five connected tales, and this article is organized along these lines. The first tale is about the scam: scammers tell victims their stories; victims believe them and send money. The second is about transnational policing: victims outside Ghana realize that they have been duped and try to find a police organization that is competent, both in legal terms and in their ability to pursue scammers. From then on, police officers and victims attempt to transform the transnational, online interactions into face-to-face encounters. They try to locate one of the scammers, to arrest someone, in the third tale. In the fourth, police officers have arrested someone associated with the scam, and attempt to identify the main scammer. Finally, police officers and victims bring the case to court. As performances, the criminal investigations did not play out as intended. Transnational policing rarely works. Ghanaian police officers use the same methods as the scammers to locate those scanners and ascertain their identity. The process of identifying scammers often leads to police officers or even politicians. Instead of providing punishment for offenders, court proceedings bring to light conflicting moral readings of scamming. The investigations inadvertently reveal that the three groups of actors – scammers, victims, and police officers – are not as clearly delineated as they seem. Ultimately, police officers and victims struggle – just as the scammers do – to create believable stories and performances.
THE SCAM: TALE ONE
This tale is about the scammers' story and the victims' reaction. The excerpt about Mr Gonzales in this article's introduction is such a story. The key question concerning a scam story is how it is made believable. Telling a supposedly non-fictional story about people and objects that do not exist is easier in transnational, online scams because the victim cannot possibly verify the relation between story and social world. However, even in interactions occurring locally, and offline, people rarely verify stories. It is through the text itself that people make stories believable. In a story about wealth from Africa, this depends on how readers imagine wealth creation and Africa, and whether or not the stories fit these imaginings. Following Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor2004: 23), such social imaginaries are shared, carried by images and stories, and form the background of practices (see also Strauss Reference Strauss2006). Stories about abundant natural resources, uneducated Africans and greedy elites envision Africa as easily exploited by bold entrepreneurs (see Burrell Reference Burrell2008; A. Smith Reference Smith2008: 31–4).Footnote 5 For Mr Gonzales, the story of a simple African woman, her inheritance of gold and the need to pay bribes did not seem fantastic, but matched his expectations of Africa. Such imaginaries, traceable to orientalist discourses (Said Reference Said1979), constitute a prism through which people orientate themselves in a globalized world (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996: 53–4). Scammers create the believability of their story by tapping into these imaginaries and by drawing on the victims' background understanding of social realities: not only of wealth creation and Africa but also of bureaucratic order (see Apter Reference Apter2005: 254), which the scammers reference by attaching official-looking documents. Other scams use different imaginaries. Romance scams work because they tap into globally circulating social imaginaries of romantic love, and some scams use religious imaginaries. A ‘policeman format’ draws on imaginaries about law enforcement. After victims realize that they have been defrauded, scammers contact them with a new email address and identity; they then claim to be police officers who can recover the victims' money. All the victim has to do is pay another sum of money.
Criminal investigations into scammers start after the fraud has been committed, when the victim questions the scammer's story. Victims struggle to reconsider their belief in the truth of the story because they depend on the imaginaries used by the scam.Footnote 6 But the shared imaginaries will now have failed as a means of orientation (see Zook Reference Zook2007: 68). An underlying belief that such representations can be trusted are a necessary premise both in transnational or online encounters and in Ghanaian urban spaces, with their high level of anonymity. Criminal investigations can be read as attempts by victims and police officers to create stories that respond to and compete with the scam story or as attempts to stabilize certain social imaginaries.Footnote 7
FINDING THE POLICE: TALE TWO
Most people are embarrassed when they find they have fallen victim to a scam. They doubt that the police can help and therefore do nothing. The victims in the three cases described here, however, lost considerable amounts of money and therefore sought a competent police organization. State police organizations are not the only ones policing the internet – just like offline policing, various actors carry out surveillance and detect crimes (see Newburn and Reiner Reference Newburn, Reiner, Maguire, Morgan and Reiner2007: 912–5).Footnote 8 Still, the police are the only ones capable of affecting criminal proceedings after the crime has been committed. As internet users are less bound to a physical location and enjoy a large degree of anonymity, national police organizations find it difficult to act on complaints about crimes committed online. The perpetrators are neither in their jurisdiction nor can police officers locate offenders by established police practices. Advance fee fraud has always revealed the shortcomings of transnational policing. In 1898, the leader of a US crime prevention society described a specific Spanish prisoner con that used telegrams. He writes: ‘As it is worked in two countries the detection and punishment of the operators are practically impossible.’Footnote 9 However, the perception that transnational policing and cyber policing are impossible has been changing gradually. By bringing their cases to the police, the three victims raised the question of whether the police are willing to pursue and capable of pursuing transnational cyber fraud cases.
Despite the establishment of some supranational police organizations, the main police actors in the realm of scamming are still local detectives in CIDs. Police officers cannot patrol cyberspace, but they can investigate fraud committed over the internet. Criminal jurisdiction in internet fraud is highly complex according to legal theory (Brenner Reference Brenner2006: 190–5); however, in practice, criminal jurisdiction is merely asserted by the organization that is in place and capable of effecting an arrest. Every local police station and judiciary can relay requests for support or arrest warrants to the police organizations in other nations via diplomatic channels, Interpol, or direct informal connections. However, public prosecutors do not actively pursue or dismiss most transnational scamming cases below a certain financial value, as such requests are unlikely to succeed.
Even if such requests reach the fraud unit in the Ghanaian Police Service, the detectives often act only on requests from police officers abroad with whom they have a personal connection. Criminal investigations and judicial proceedings in Ghana are not an automated bureaucratic process; rather, they necessitate the support, financial help, constant involvement and physical presence of the complainant (Beek Reference Beek2012: 559). Only through direct interpersonal channels can complainants signal their willingness to support the Ghanaian detectives, and therefore only cases arriving in this manner are pursued. The three cyber fraud cases described in this article – high-profile cases involving large amounts of money – were relayed informally. Only where informal support is forthcoming, making up for Ghanaian detectives' lack of equipment and holding the promise of additional income, do such cases have a chance of being transmitted and accepted transnationally. The fraud unit in the CID headquarters of the Ghanaian police consists of about twenty detectives. As a unit in the national CID headquarters, they receive additional training from foreign police officers.Footnote 10 Still, their equipment is rather limited: they have only one car and two computers. Detectives have no official access to the internet, but have to pay for internet access themselves. Therefore, detectives expect complainants to support them with technical equipment and money. However, this does not mean that the officers are interested only in monetary gain. Most members of the fraud unit are young police officers who received good grades in police training and often have a university degree.
Detectives feel that their social position is similar to that of the scammers, but they stress the differences:
Actually there were times when I was tempted. The times before I became a police, when I was also tempted to become a scammer. But I didn't know . . . I was not brought up to tell lies. [. . .] I can't start telling stories that maybe my mother is dead and give me money.Footnote 11
Corporal Antwi portrays the diverging motivations in terms of Christian morality: of temptation versus unambiguous moral imperatives (see Lentz Reference Lentz, Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan2014). Detectives want, in their own words, to ‘do the right thing’. Still, their economic interests lead to inconsistencies with the moral tales they want to tell. Police officers attempt to shift the interaction. Because of the inner workings of their organization, they want to move away from internet communication, expecting the victim to travel to Ghana. For the investigations to move forward, the interactions have to be transformed into face-to-face encounters in Ghana that are informed by the rationalities of West African police work.
When understood as a series of tales, most cyber fraud cases end with the first one. However, while the scammer produces stories that question the police's capability with regard to cybercrime, some cases are transferred transnationally and the Ghanaian police increasingly take on a few of these cases. The police thereby create competing stories about maintaining order and fighting crime online and worldwide. The everyday routine of transferring cases reveals, however, that such stories are not always consistent with all aspects of police work in Ghana.
SCAMMING THE SCAMMERS: TALE THREE
After a case has been successfully transmitted to the Ghanaian police organization, detectives attempt to locate the suspect. Criminal investigations in Ghana are generally difficult, as police officers work in a low-technology, low-infrastructure and low-legitimacy environment. In regular investigations, detectives deal with this quite successfully by using civilian complainants and informants to gather information and identify suspects (see Beek Reference Beek2012: 561–2). In cyber fraud cases, however, neither complainant nor informants have sufficient knowledge to support the investigation. Nor can detectives rely on internet surveillance or technical means to detect offenders. In Ghana, at the time of my research, neither internet cafes nor mobile phone providers required identification papers; SIM registration was introduced in 2011 but has several loopholes. While bank account holders and those using money transfer services must present identification papers, scammers use easily acquirable forged documents. After an arduous struggle to persuade these financial companies to release such information, police officers obtain only a blurry photocopy of the offender's picture and a wrong name and address.
Therefore, Ghanaian police officers have developed a distinct approach for cybercrime cases: they use the same practices as scammers. By telling stories, detectives try to persuade scammers to meet them, to transform the internet contact into a face-to-face communication, which allows them to arrest a suspect. Detectives tell intricate, fantastic stories, play various social roles, and sometimes even forge documents, similar to the way in which scammers operate. Police have learned these practices from the scammers. Even police equipment – laptops and spoofed telephone numbers – is often acquired from scammers. However, because their investigative strategy depends on believable stories, police officers asked me not to retell the various narratives – or formats – they use. The more scammers are aware of this corpus of stories, the less effectively they work. Scammers' narratives ‘wear out’ in a remarkably similar way. The basic course of action of these investigations, as is evident below, can nonetheless be outlined without giving away any secrets. As the case of Mr Gonzales shows, appropriating scammers' practices has unintended consequences:
Detective Lance-Corporal Kofi was in charge of Gonzales' case, and wanted to arrange a meeting with the scammers to arrest them. He had already instructed Gonzales to tell the scammer, a man who called himself Mr Benson, that his representative would arrive in Ghana soon. I was supposed to claim to be Gonzales' representative in Ghana and to arrange a meeting. This was a new ‘format’ the detectives could try out because they had convinced me to play a part in their scheme. In the following days, I had several phone conversations with these scammers. But Mr Benson cancelled all meetings at the last minute. He told very long-winded stories to explain the cancellation. Simultaneously, he called Gonzales again and again, telling him that I was responsible for these delays. Gonzales began to call me constantly, urging me to search for the boxes of gold after the arrest because he was still half-convinced by the scammers' narrative. Detective Kofi planned to expand his story by renting a hotel room and cars for me, but Gonzales was reluctant because of the costs. Just before our next scheduled meeting, the scammer called me but quickly gave the phone to his partner, whom he introduced as a German colleague. The man on the other line spoke perfect German, slightly vernacular. He introduced himself as being from Mainz in Germany and we did some small talk. After some sentences I realized that I had met this man several weeks earlier in another CID office. He was a sixty-year-old, grandfatherly man and had been introduced to me as a German fraud victim from Frankfurt and we had talked a bit. Now, I understood that this man was collaborating with the scammers, knew of the police involvement and probably had learned my real name. Remarkably, neither he nor I said anything about this in our phone conversation; instead, we played along with the fictions concocted by Mr Benson and Detective Kofi. Afterwards, the scammers still acted like they were trying to meet us. But Detective Kofi was no longer interested in the case because it had taken too much time and he did not want to confront the police officers connected with the German scammer. Gonzales became increasingly wary of Kofi's claims. Kofi, in turn, began to complain that ‘Gonzales believes them more than me.’ Kofi asked Gonzales to come to Ghana to pursue the case, but in the end nothing came of it.Footnote 12
West African scammers are elusive. Police officers and scholars often depict them as poor but well-educated young men with no other means of advancement, who work in loosely connected groups (Burrell Reference Burrell2008: 20; D. J. Smith Reference Smith2008: 34–8). Other scholars suggest that some groups are organized, professional criminal operations (Aning Reference Aning2007: 197; Brunton Reference Brunton2013: 106). In Gonzales' case, however, it became apparent that scammers are not always young Ghanaian men who fit the preconceptions of police officers, victims, and scholars. Despite the knowledge that people can create online identities detached from their offline ones, victims and others often revert to stereotypes, substituting the scammers' fraudulent self-presentations with other fantasies of the West African scammer. However, many scam emails do not come from Africa, and some scammers who operate in West Africa are not from there. In Ghana, several Europeans who collaborated with scammers have been arrested – often in cons against Ghanaian victims.Footnote 13 According to police officers, many of these Europeans were previously victims but later collaborated with the people who had defrauded them. Yet, this glimpse beyond the scammers' online identities sits uneasily with the victims' and officers' narratives, as it unsettles the clear distinction between victims and criminals, innocent Europeans and fraudulent Africans.
The officers did not effect an arrest in Gonzales' case and felt that their investigation had failed. Nor did the investigations lead to the intended results on a symbolic level. In the police officers' view, their investigations are neither performances nor storytelling; instead, they ought to reveal the truth. However, by relying on storytelling themselves, the police officers became complicit in the scammers' fictional narratives.Footnote 14 In the end, all the involved parties knew that their narratives were no longer believed. Still, they all continued to play along, entangled in their stories, and nobody called the other's bluff. As indicated by my conversation with the German scammer, nobody wanted to reveal anything about his or her offline identity. Gonzales continued to play the role of the unknowing victim to lure the scammers, writing long emails and conversing with everyone involved on the phone. Detective Kofi continued to plan more elaborate schemes and even began to lie to Gonzales to remain credible. The scammers had not yet given up, and continued in the hope of getting one more payment out of Gonzales. Nobody wanted to call the other's bluff because everybody still hoped that the other believed parts of his story. Those involved continued to act according to stories they knew were factually inaccurate.
Most notably, everybody tried to keep control of the narrative, to be the story's author. Detective Kofi's comment that ‘Gonzales believes them more than me’ reveals that Kofi was beginning to lose this struggle. Instead of putting an end to storytelling by investigating the facts, he had become a competing co-author who was similarly concerned with believability. The investigations in Gonzales' case failed pragmatically because the scammers were never located. Beyond questions of success and failure, using the scammers' practices had unintended implications. Instead of disproving the scammers' tales, police officers and victims had become just another kind of actor creating a different story, becoming entangled in their narratives.
IDENTIFYING THE CRIMINAL: TALE FOUR
In the fourth tale of the investigations, police officers try to identify scammers. Even if they have managed to locate and arrest someone during the third tale, this person is often not the main suspect but an associate. Detectives use the threat of criminal proceedings and the intimidating effect of the cells as a tool to gain the support of such suspects. More and more people become implicated in these investigations, and the main culprit is often the fourth or fifth suspect in a number of consecutive arrests. Each suspect tells a slightly different version of the story and therefore the narrative grows increasingly complex, as in the case of Fatimah:
When Fatimah, a forty-year-old Sudanese woman and the wife of a Sudanese regional minister, arrived at the CID headquarters in Accra, she spoke directly to Commander Bernard in the fraud unit because of the ‘diplomatic implications’. Several months ago, she had received an offer via email to buy gold. At the time, she had come to Ghana to negotiate the deal. On her arrival, she bypassed the immigration desk at the airport. Instead, a private security guard and an immigrations service officer brought her directly to Mr Abdulah, supposedly a gold trader from Yemen. For some days she and some friends stayed in a hotel as Abdulah's only guests. He was a rich man living in a villa next door, owned four cars and was protected by armed bodyguards. He had shown her coffers full of gold, supposedly Saddam Hussein's treasure stolen from Iraqis who had fled to Ghana, a story that Fatimah still believed. Afterwards, she flew back to Sudan and transferred the negotiated amount, US$800,000 in total. But then, Abdulah started to delay. She realized that she had been defrauded. Now she was coming back to Ghana to recover her money. Abdulah had called her on her (second) arrival in Accra. He claimed that all Ghanaian police received their salary from him, threatened to kill her and already knew the name of the hotel she was staying in.
At 4 a.m. the next morning, Commander Bernard and some police officers raided Abdulah's villa and the hotel. They did not find Abdulah but arrested the hotel owner, his associate, and his three children, who were about to leave the country. The commander separated all of them and interrogated the hotel owner – an immigrant from Niger – in his office and in Fatimah's presence. While the hotel owner admitted that he knew Abdulah, he claimed to know nothing about his dealings and told a convoluted story about how he came to know Fatimah. Commander Bernard started a prolonged interrogation, trying to implicate him and asking for the current whereabouts of Abdulah. The interrogation led nowhere. After the Nigerien had repeatedly asked for his lawyer, Bernard took out the Ghanaian Constitution and the Criminal Procedure law, reading aloud the passages about the police mandate to arrest offenders for forty-eight hours on reasonable grounds, and said he suspected them of ‘conspiracy to defraud’. He sent the Nigerien and his associate to the cells but eventually released the children. These arrests seemed to lead nowhere; therefore Commander Bernard wanted to follow up on the accomplices at the airport. But in the background, the case became a ‘dangerous case’, as a detective told me in a hushed voice. Commander Bernard had looked through the contact list of the Nigerien's mobile, and found the phone numbers of several police officers. He detained one of them, but several others were too high up the chain of command.
On the next day, a detective, Fatimah and I went to the airport. After telling her story to the airport manager, she identified one of the older private security guards as the one who had picked her up on the tarmac. At first, the security guard claimed not to be involved. But his memory soon came back when the manager threatened to fire him and the detective threatened to implicate him in the case. He then named the immigration service officer who had brought her into the country the first time. The officer was sent to the fraud unit after he had been named and Commander Bernard interrogated him respectfully, telling him that they regarded him as a ‘colleague’ and were only searching for the ‘truth’. But the immigration officer told a long story and claimed that there had been a mix-up and he had never been involved. Despite heated arguments, he offered no names.
In the meantime, the detectives had managed to arrest another relative of the Nigerien's family using their own pictures. Most notably, they thought that they had managed to turn one of the suspects into an informant who said that Abdulah was fleeing to Togo in a diplomatic car. The detectives tried to arrest him on the way but ultimately failed. They sent a search request via Interpol, but nobody thought anything would come of it. The hotel owner's family had to be released. Abdulah still harassed Fatimah with hourly phone calls. Her husband had told her to forget the money and threatened to divorce her if she did not return. In the end she flew home.Footnote 15
After the detectives had managed to locate one person connected to the scam, further investigations were aimed not at expanding the story to string the scammer along but at curtailing further storytelling. Fatimah's version served as a guideline and template. Each suspect presented different, new versions of the story: new names, new explanations, and so on. The detectives, in turn, attempted to limit the story's expanding drive. Detectives asked for and wrote down only the basic facts: who did what (see Göpfert Reference Göpfert2013). They attempted to establish a simple story on the basis of mundane details: names, the exact appearance of the immigration officer's uniform, the type of car the immigration officer drove, and so on. Their way of writing things down is an attempt to reconnect material objects with the story. Names and objects are presented as recognizable and decipherable and as a link to only one possible version of the story. While the scammers' narratives are detached from such facts, detectives use these details to re-link them. Officers dismiss competing versions if they do not conform to traceable facts or documents.Footnote 16 They ultimately aim to create a decidedly non-fictional narrative – one that is factually accurate – by basing it on these details and documents. Furthermore, they try to become the sole authors of the story, by controlling the text in the case docket.
However, when looking at the associate's contact list – his social connections – the detectives revealed how high these connections reach in the official hierarchy. From the outset, it was clear that Ghanaian officials were involved, and Abdulah's eventual flight was probably facilitated by the fact that he was being constantly informed about the criminal investigation. Many scholars have commented on these entanglements between politicians, law enforcement and scammers (Adogame Reference Adogame2009: 563; Aning Reference Aning2007: 198; Hibou Reference Hibou, Bayart, Ellis and Hibou1999: 104). Ghanaians to whom I spoke were convinced that each police officer in the investigation was taking money. Such entanglements, however, are not simply about scammers bribing police officers. Instead, scammers and their associates have social relations with police officers that have a monetary dimension. According to Detective Antwi, the scammers' friends in government or police headquarters would often call and try to persuade him to discontinue a case, not by threatening him outright but by referring to his sense of obligation. However, Fatimah's case shows that these entanglements do not always serve their intended purpose. Detectives can refuse requests to discontinue a case, but this impacts negatively on their career and puts their relationship with colleagues at risk. The detectives in the fraud unit pressed ahead with their investigations nevertheless and even detained the implicated police officer. Like the line between scammers and their victims, that between scammers and police officers is constantly called into question by the connections between the two.
Due to these problems, most police officers' actions against scammers are not criminal investigations started by a complainant, but raids initiated by scammers against their partners in crime. After acquiring a client, scammers often transfer him or her to a fellow scammer who is more capable of executing particular operations in the scam (a face-to-face meeting, a webcam meeting with a girlfriend, etc.). The scammer transferring the money expects to receive part of the potential earnings. When such deals are dishonoured later – or when one scammer envies another scammer's successful ‘hit’ – scammers become informants for the police. The police officers raid the competitor scammer, but only to grab a share of his earnings, part of which they then give to their informant. Scamming is just one illicit economy the police target in this way (Beek Reference Beek2014: 118).
Through the act of identification, police officers attempt to move beyond the scammers' fictional narratives. Criminal investigations are an attempt to establish a single version of the narrative that is factually accurate, one in which visible facts are reconnected to the story. By dismissing other versions of the story, they claim authorial control. However, the police's entanglements cast doubt on the distinction between police officers and scammers, and, again, make scammers powerful co-authors.
SENTENCING AND MORALS: TALE FIVE
Few instances of fraud become police cases. Only rarely do such cases lead to an arrest. And only a fraction of these arrests lead to a court case (see Bierschenk Reference Bierschenk2008: 118–9): police work is about the potential – rather than the actuality – of restoring social order. Two elements make Ghanaian criminal investigations against internet scammers distinct. Firstly, actors' economic interests are inconsistent with the story they want to tell. Secondly, all involved have very different and ambiguous understandings of cyber fraud. The proceedings in Maria's case showed both:
Maria, a forty-year-old Czech accountant, had met a US soldier stationed in Iraq on an online dating service; she had fallen in love with him in the course of long email and internet messaging conversations. After he and his children had fallen on hard times during his business venture in Ghana, she had sent him US$45,000 in several instalments via money transfer services. When she realized that she had been defrauded, she first contacted the Czech police, but the case was closed due to a lack of public interest. Then, she contacted Detective Corporal Antwi in the fraud unit via the embassy. With promises, she and Antwi managed to lure the scammer to a public space and the detective arrested him.
Immediately after the arrest, Antwi was approached by two senior police officers who asked him to halt the case. He later told me in an interview: ‘I have a lot of pressure . . . I have a lot of focus from people who are threatening me left and right for doing the right thing. And I actually have to stand on my feet and make sure this case moves forward. I even made some recordings of some of the speeches they are trying to make . . .’ Despite the interference, he was adamant about bringing the case to court. According to him, he got to know Maria as a ‘kind person’ and wanted to take a stand: ‘Most scammers think we policemen only arrest them for the money. I wanted to show them that it is not true.’ Antwi's nickname in the unit was ‘hero’, because he had arrested several scammers.
Criminal cases can only be heard in Ghanaian courts when the complainant is present. Despite advice from friends and the Czech Foreign Office not to go to Ghana for security reasons, Maria flew to Accra to appear in court. In Ghana, she gave Antwi US$1,350, in the form of various presents, to support the criminal investigation. The trial took place in a crowded circuit court in Accra. The suspect was Mr Seidu, a young man wearing a loose white shirt. Maria gave her statement. Some emails were tendered in evidence and read aloud, to laughter on the bench. The next day, the counsel for the defence had his turn, insinuating that the money had been a gift in a romantic relationship, not a loan in a business transaction. Detective Antwi was sure that the suspect would be sentenced to a fine equivalent to his proceeds and additionally to five years in prison. Several months later, the court found Seidu guilty and sentenced him to a fine of 1,050 cedis (approximately US $500) and a fifteen-month prison sentence if he failed to pay (‘in default’). This is at the lower end of possible sentences. Defrauding by false pretence is a second-degree felony in the Ghanaian Criminal Offences Act and punishable with up to ten years in prison. The court ordered the sale of his laptop and car. Proceeds were meant to be given to Maria (but never were). Seidu paid the fine immediately and was free to go. In an email to me, Maria wrote that she was disappointed to the core. She felt that Seidu had effectively been acquitted.Footnote 17
As briefly discussed earlier, there is a tension between the representation of criminal investigation as crime fighting and the economics of everyday police work in Ghana. Antwi, like all Ghanaian detectives, expects support for the case and a ‘tip’. While these cases are risky career-wise, they allow them to acquire larger than usual tips from foreigners. Also, detectives do not have to share these payments with their superiors, unlike they do in ordinary cases. Above all, in the actors' perception, this does not necessarily invalidate the story about restoring order. Neither Antwi nor Maria perceived these payments as outright corruption.
The lenient sentence in this case certainly undermined the intended moral subtext of the investigation – and not only in Maria's eyes. When Ghanaians hear about a case that contradicts their expectations of justice, they presume that the judge has been bribed (Budniok Reference Budniok2014). A plausible explanation of this sentence could also lie in Maria's failure to give money to the police prosecutor, who was consequently less inclined to ensure a conviction.
Above all, the ruling reflects the fact that the various co-authors of this series of stories tell very different versions as each story reflects different morals. Discretionary decisions by judges are difficult to assess. In this case, the judge followed the arguments of the defence that the offence occurred as part of a lie in a romantic relationship, not as false pretence in a business relationship. Therefore, he selected a very lenient sentence. The police officer, the scammer and the judge assess the morality of scamming very differently, reflecting the wider discourse in Ghana. The Ghanaian term for scamming, sakawa, reflects its socially destabilizing effect.Footnote 18 Police officers and most Ghanaians think that these scams persuade victims only because scammers employ the support of mallams and jujumen. They describe sakawa as ‘blood magic’; scammers receive special powers of persuasion – in the form of talismans or Indian rings – by sacrificing friends or relatives.Footnote 19 In the early 2010s, there was a full-blown moral panic, and Ghanaian newspapers were full of stories about sakawa. Most Ghanaians, including police officers, are deeply concerned with their Christian or Muslim religious beliefs, and so, by describing scamming as an occult practice to get ‘quick money’, they present it as powerful but fundamentally amoral. Additionally, scamming is also discussed in terms of its effects on Ghana's relations with the wider world in official discourse. There is a widespread fear that Ghana could be perceived as negatively as Nigeria and that such an image would threaten transnational trade and investment. Yet, some Ghanaians – including some police officers and judges – see scamming as just ‘payback’ for European exploitation of Africa since colonial times or for other global injustices.
The various people engaged in telling Maria's case fundamentally disagree on its moral message. Actors contextualize the actions in cyber fraud very differently, from occultism to international relations to historic injustices. As long as the interactions are transnational and online – in other words, until the police case starts and the complainant arrives in Ghana – these different perceptions do not matter. However, during face-to-face encounters in Ghana, the inconsistencies become apparent. Police officers and victims hope that the final court decision validates their story. However, the judge's ruling authorizes a reading of events that implies that the scammer's story was not a purely fictional ‘romance format’ but a partly true love story. Burrell (Reference Burrell2008: 19) argues convincingly that Ghanaians do not see all misrepresentations in online interactions as fraud, but that they carefully distinguish between acceptable and inacceptable forms of online misrepresentation (see also Fair et al. Reference Fair, Tully, Ekdale and Asante2009: 36). At the end of the criminal investigation, there is no shared sense of the story's moral but rather disagreement about whether the story was a scam after all.
Until now, the article has not examined the victims as a specific actor group. Mr Gonzales, Fatimah and Maria all pursued their cases to recover their money. Additionally, and literally in Maria's case, they acted as co-authors. To deal with her embarrassment and emotional betrayal, she wrote and published a book about her fight against scammers in a bid to tell her own story. Yet, like those of the scammers and police officers, sometimes victims' stories are inconsistent with their actions. Generally, victims get involved in scams because they think they can profit illegally, for instance by evading customs duties in gold scams. More specifically, in the course of all three investigations it became clear that the victims engaged – or were willing to engage – in legally and morally questionable practices. This does not apply to all victims. The few that successfully transfer criminal cases to Ghana are a skewed sample. Most victims of romance scams are not wealthy and are often plunged into debt by their involvement. The victims described here, however, were rather affluent, and, surprisingly, their money also came from morally questionable sources: Gonzales had closed his chiropractor clinic and worked as a financial consultant, speculating in real estate worldwide. In a Los Angeles Times article, the reporter writes about the dubious companies to which Gonzales is connected.Footnote 20 Fatimah had US$800,000 to invest because she was the wife of a Sudanese regional minister. She wanted to get these funds out of the country via anonymous money transfer services because of an asset freeze ordered by the United Nations. Maria worked as an accountant for a Czech textile company that ran several sweatshops in Turkey; she wanted to use her stay in Ghana to set up a new sweatshop there. Parallel to her court case, she negotiated with the Free Zone Board about the legal possibilities of tax and custom exemptions and of banning unions from this new sweatshop.Footnote 21 These victims had made their own fortunes in schemes that were perhaps similarly fantastical and as shady as the scammers' fictional offers. Maria's attempt to become a neoliberal entrepreneur even resonates with scammer narratives of Africa as the continent of unclaimed riches. Scammers' stories are narratives about ‘how value enters the world’, not only offering but also explaining wealth (A. Smith Reference Smith2008: 39). The victims' biographies suggest that the scammers' fictions are similar to many non-fictional transregional economic interactions (see D. J. Smith Reference Smith2008: 30). Looking at these victims makes it possible to reconsider the meaning of the transnational connections that the cases were about at the start. Transregional financial transactions may indeed often be about tax evasion, money laundering by corrupt officials, and direct investments that erode corporate liability and workers' rights. As Brooke Harrington (Reference Harrington and Knorr-Cetina2012: 396–8) argues, actions are not inherently fraudulent but become so in certain interactional settings, and as such are an inherent part of capitalism. Legitimate and illegitimate transnational flows of capital may not be as distinct as commonly assumed. Perhaps the main difference between scamming and other illegal, transregional economic interactions is the fact that the profiteers are not the usual ones. Even when looking at the victims, it seems difficult to establish a final version and a clear morality behind the scam stories.
CONCLUSION
While the first tale takes place in virtual spaces between continents, the later ones are located in Ghana and are about police work there. On a symbolic level, criminal investigations serve to restore a moral order. However, the story that emerges through the investigation is not the one that police officers and victims originally envisioned. As a result of the partly illegal or immoral monetary interests held by officers and victims, inconsistencies occur between the stories they tell and what actually happens. By appropriating scamming practices, detectives become entangled in the scammers' and their own fantastic stories. Despite their attempts to re-link facts and stories during interrogations, their authorial control is undermined by the connections between officers and scammers. In the course of investigations, the distinction between actor groups and in underlying moral dichotomies deteriorate. Some scammers have been former victims. Some police officers and judges support scammers and see scamming as justifiable. Stories are a means of both orientation and manipulation, and everyone involved finds it increasingly difficult to tell the difference and struggles to narrate a believable story.
As people very much depend on believable stories and established imaginaries to make sense of the world, this experience disorients all involved.Footnote 22 According to Apter (Reference Apter, Comaroff and Comaroff1999: 278), the ‘foundations of social interaction begin to crumble’ due to scamming; identities are revealed as unstable and symbols lose their meaning. When Maria told fellow victims at one internet forum about her dealings with the Ghanaian police and her appearance in front of the circuit court, these internet users believed the whole scenario was a scam. They were convinced that everyone involved – from judge to police officers and to observing anthropologists – were the scammers' associates and that they were all playing a certain role. Maria writes at the end of her book that ‘in Ghana, you can't count on anything’.Footnote 23 These victims have lost all trust that stories from West Africans can be relied upon. Yet, the deeply ambivalent role of the victims suggests that inconsistencies not only emerged out of Ghanaian police practices but were there from the tales' beginnings. Indeed, it was only because the later stories were located in Ghana and were transformed into face-to-face interactions that these inconsistencies became apparent: once located in a specific national context it became possible for me as an ethnographer to observe them and to recount the moral struggles of police officers, the complex Ghanaian discourse on scamming, and the morally questionable practices of the victims. Paradoxically, it suggests that a transnational, online phenomenon such as scamming can most fruitfully be explored by studying the everyday interactions and stories in a Ghanaian police station.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was made possible by support from the Africa's Asian Options (AFRASO) project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and from the project ‘Boundary Work’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). For critical comments, I am grateful to Frank Schulze-Engler, Matthias Krings, Ajay Dubey, Harish Naraindas, Mirco Göpfert, Matthias Gruber and Phillipe Kersting.
