CYBER CRIME AMONGST CAMEROONIAN YOUTHS

Scamming and web camera prostitution have gradually eaten deep into the habits of Cameroonians youths who spend hours on the internet deceiving people as scammers and exposing their nudity as web cam prostitutes. The boys are usually scammers and girls web cam prostitutes.
Student at a Government school aged 16 reveals how he has been involved in scamming and often extorted money from pet lovers abroad to renovate their house. He owns two mobile phones a taxi and is thinking about quitting school to start a business of his.
On the other hand a web cam prostitute spends four dollars a day chatting with an “L’inconnue” often used by French speaking Cameroonians, which means ‘’an unknown’’. She exposes parts of her body over to cash money through transfer agencies.
The scammer gets online searches with google and the search engine opens up. The scammer types in the google search box, ‘’capuchin and marmoset monkeys’’ when it opens up, he copies and paste on a word document send to Craiglist.com and back page.com as adverts. It is worth noting that their mailing addresses are always found on the advert for correspondent purposes. An interested buyer gets it and contacts him. The scammer after receiving an email contact will begin to ask for transportation money approximately 300 dollars per monkey and 200 dollars for shipping. He calls the buyer from a phone booth and talks at length since calling America per minute has dropped to virtually nothing as cost. When the money is sent, the buyer never gets to see the monkey and unfortunately, has no one to report the matter to.
Meanwhile the web cam prostitute goes to a cyber café that runs 24 hours on 24. Its always at about 10:00pm that one finds a young girl dressed in very scanty wear to a cyber café looking very serious. The prostitute after purchasing a ticket to use a webcam, gets to a small private box in which is found a computer connected to the internet with the use of a peripheral tool called web cam which is capable of capturing images and transmitting through the internet once online. Only one-person can make use of the room at a given time that is why it is called private box. You can close and lock it and no one would even know what is going inside. It is about 4 cm in width and 2m in length with no windows. The box has a small fan that fans out more heat than in the actual sense of circulating fresher and cooler air. There are three categories of prostitutes those interested in finding a partner who is willing to pay, she will on probability basis of trust expose her nudity on the condition she would receive money to be sent to her the next day. The second class prostitutes gets to chat with the unknown for weeks so as to get acquainted to the unknown, develop trust and feign affection before beginning to expose their nudity.
The third are those who do not desire to receive money but to get intimate with their unknown partners so that they can invite them to Europe and the U.S. Wherever these individuals may be. The consequences for this third class are
Disastrous when they finally find their way to Europe and the U.S. It is rampant to hear stories of girls who have visited Europe and U.S. on invitation from their unknown partners. They revealed that while abroad, they were locked up in a room and obliged to copulate with many boys; than they expected. They left with hazy notions of going to live better lives but ended up being destroyed and thrown on the streets. With no job no qualification they are forced at the age of 15 – 18 to brave the streets of Europe as real prostitutes and no longer as web cam prostitutes and others are repatriated.

From scamming and web cam prostitution, these children return home with fabulous sums of money and some of their desperate parents do not bother to find out how and where they obtained the money. They have no fear of the law and immediately, they begin to draw projects on how to make use of the money. The condoning attitude of parents whose children are involved in such crimal acts makes the issue of cyber crime disturbing.
With the consent of these parents they dropout of school. The question they usually post is if schooling means future preparation towards achieving money, why should they continue when they have an easy way of getting money with less stress and more money at the end. Dropping out is the sole alternative so as to dedicate time to scamming and web cam prostitution.
Parents have forgotten the issues of morality to train their children in an upright manner so as to be proud of them and are helping to build a degenerated society with no incentive to hard work but deceit.

Yet the authorities that be, the lawmakers of the Land have instituted feeble laws against cyber crime and rarely do implement.
Money transfer agencies on their parts partake in the deal and share a portion of the increasing decadent behaviors as they demand a share of money from these scammers and web cam prostitutes as bribe.
Some cyber café have forbidden the use of web cameras and denied the opening of web pages like Craig list all in a bid to put and end to cyber crime meanwhile, the Government is taking a step ahead as some cyber criminals are in jail. But what policies to implement to stop this high rate of cyber crime is what the Cameroonian Government should start working on or else, the next generation would be a threat to the principle of human morality