Not all the people doing business on the Net from Nigeria are scammers. Over the years I have met some very nice, hard working people living in Nigeria and they don’t all deserve to get financially slammed or dumped on because Steve Renner from Cash Cards knows how to read the FAFT money laundering country list.
Especially now, since June of 2006 the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) decided to remove Nigeria from its list of countries and territories that are non co-operative in the international community’s efforts to fight money laundering. (.pdf)
There are really NO hopeful options for a Nigerian who has lost their legitimate funds because of the Cash Cards International ’seizure’.
Additionally, if I had solicited and directly participated in an online business with Nigeria for years, then decided to freeze the funds under the premise of AML, I could walk away with a very sizable amount of ‘Frozen Funds’ assuming no further legal hassles. Does that make it right?
Was this private seizure done within US law or is Cash Cards ‘cashing in’ on some lesser fortunate people who did nothing wrong?
CashCards International is a distributor of ATM cards, an exchange agent for e-gold digital gold currency and also operates their own online currency known as V-Cash. They seem to have been around since 2001. The business is run by Steve Renner a successful Internet marketer and entrepreneur.
In June of 2006 Cash Cards gave this notice to the public:
“Effective Immediately, Cash Cards International can no longer do business with persons or businesses from Nigeria. For a number of years the Financial Action Task Force (”FATF”) has placed Nigeria on the “Back List” of Non Cooperative countries in the fight against Money Laundering. According to the US State Department, Nigeria is a worldwide hub for Money Laundering activity, and is notorious for Financial Fraud Schemes that involve the International Wire Transfer of funds. For more information:http://www.fatf-gafi.org/dataoecd/16/23/36174130.pdf
http://www.fintrac.gc.ca/publications/avs/2004-10-29_e.asp
http://www.fatf-gafi.org/dataoecd/43/53/34949558.pdf
http://www.fincen.gov/advis32.pdf
http://www.oecd.org/document/61/0,2340,fr_2649_37453_2487165_1_1_1_37453,00.htmlAs an international corporation we have been monitoring the progress of Nigeria to meet the requirements to be taken off the “Black List”. Unfortunately, there just hasn’t been enough progress (see first reference above) and as such we must now suspend all transactions with individuals or businesses from Nigeria to include freezing all V-Cash accounts opened by Nigerians. At such time that Nigeria meets the criteria to be removed from the “Black List”, we will again open up these accounts.”
But as a Nigerian client during that time if you called Cash Cards Minnesota office, your conversation was like this, “…i got one of the support guys, he told me yes, Nigeria has been taken off the list[FAFT] but their banks are still waiting for the proper green light to resume operation.” *http://www.nairaland.com/
Many if not most Nigerians I’ve heard from since planning this post said they felt that Cash Cards International may simply be scamming them out of their money. They don’t understand why they can’t get their funds back. I have to also include my opinion which is — why have they kept these funds?
Tunde Akingbade is a reporter in Nigeria and ended up interviewing by telephone many locals who were on the losing end of the Cash Cards seizure. Mr. Akingbade had this to say,
“The estimate that I have is that what we have lost could be close to one billion naira. Each time we write and press to have our money, all we see is that these people ignore us because we cannot cross the sea to America to fight them one on one to retrieve our money trapped in the Cash Card International account.”
Here are some of the interviews highlights with the ‘victims’.
Mr. Emeka Anyanwu, was interviewed and he is a business administration graduate, with 450 people in his marketing team participating in the Cash Cards referral program:
I have an investment of about N980,000. [$7,644 USD] I was coordinating my team’s activity. Most of them were entrusting cash on me. The total investment of my team was about N4 million [$31,200]. …It was a referral business. They trade with you in gold and at the end of every two weeks they put it back in the Cash Card account….But, precisely, on April 28, 2006, they said they held a meeting in South Africa that Nigeria is one of the countries that had been listed for money laundering and, for that reason, our investment and cash have been frozen until further notice. We kept mailing them. It got to a time when they stopped replying us. If we called them, they didn’t talk to us anymore.
Mr. Akingbade asks him, “When did you start the business?”
We started early February 2006 … April, May, June, they first blew the news that countries that they will not deal with, countries that have star or asterisk in their names and they will not be doing transaction with them. We felt it was a normal thing. But the following month they froze our account without any notice…We even wrote to FBI.
And what report did you get from the FBI?
Nothing. We are now saying if this company actually had an investment with us and the company will no longer be doing business with us, they should return our capital investment. Apart from the capital investment, we have what is called V Cash account, which is E-Gold. In Nigeria, this is like a normal bank account. This is where all our earnings are placed. But if this company will no longer be doing business with us, why will they freeze the account?
Continued on Monday
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