W 419

Let’s start somewhere unromantic.

If you’re a young Black man in Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, or much of West Africa, your first lesson in economics isn’t theory. It’s hunger.

It’s standing on the side of the road before sunrise selling gala apples, sachet water, or phone cards. And the math is simple and unforgiving:

If you don’t sell enough gala apples, that’s your dinner.

No metaphor. That’s the equation.

So you hustle. You carry loads. You wash cars. You run errands. You do security work that pays in loose change and promises. You string together odd jobs in an economy that was never designed to absorb you, because decades of structural adjustment, privatization, and externally imposed “reforms” hollowed out anything resembling stability.

If you’re lucky enough to land formal employment, it’s often with a multinational corporation extracting value from your country and exporting it elsewhere. The surplus you generate shows up in London, Houston, or Amsterdam. What stays behind is a wage that barely covers transportation, assuming you skip a meal.

This isn’t bad luck. It’s architecture.

And it sits atop a history everyone in the region knows by heart: lands pillaged, borders drawn with rulers by foreign hands, millions kidnapped and sold, entire societies reorganized around extraction. West Africa was not “underdeveloped” by accident. It was deliberately made useful to someone else.

So when people in the West talk about corruption or personal failure, it lands differently here. You’re living among the ruins of stolen wealth while being told the theft is over and the scoreboard is final.

Then, somewhere in this landscape, an oga appears. A big brother. A neighborhood legend. Someone who isn’t selling hope or hard-work mythology. He offers something else.

A laptop.
A Gmail account.
A script.

Welcome to the café.

You become a café boy. You learn the language. You send the emails. You wait.

And all it takes is one fish.

One man in Ohio. One retiree in Manchester. One businessman in Ontario whose greed outruns his caution. One Western Union transfer. One MoneyGram slip.

And suddenly the arithmetic changes. A full meal. Rice. Cooking oil. Medicine. School fees. Maybe a generator. Money that would take months or years of legal labor to earn, if it could be earned at all.

You don’t have to celebrate this to understand it.
You only have to understand hunger.

This is the backdrop against which 419 emerges. Not as a moral crusade. Not as a heroic resistance movement. But as a rational response inside a system that has made legality a luxury good.

Now that we got that out of the way…

If we’re going to talk honestly about 419, we need to drop the fairy tale that the West doesn’t know fraud.

Because if 419 is defined as deception used to extract wealth, then Western capitalism is saturated with it.

Corporations routinely engage in practices that meet every substantive criterion of fraud: misleading financial statements, deliberate misinformation, wage theft, predatory lending, environmental damage concealed for profit, tax evasion through shell companies, regulatory capture, price fixing. These aren’t accidents. They’re planned, lawyered, and modeled.

The difference isn’t behavior. It’s branding.

Instead of a Gmail account and a fake inheritance, the scam arrives as a quarterly earnings call. A glossy corporate social responsibility report. A terms-and-conditions document nobody reads. A settlement agreement that explicitly avoids admitting wrongdoing.

Same act. Better font.

And when these crimes are discovered, the punishment is revealing. Not prison. Not moral panic. Not documentaries about cultural decay. Just fines. Settlements. Deferred prosecution agreements.

Pennies on the dollar.

Banks launder cartel money and pay a fee.
Pharmaceutical companies misrepresent addiction risk and pay a fee.
Oil companies hide environmental damage and pay a fee.
Tech companies harvest data illegally and pay a fee.

The fine is folded neatly into operating costs. Shareholders are protected. Executives retire comfortably. Nobody asks what this says about “Western values.”

The message is unmistakable: if you steal upward, it’s business. If you steal downward, it’s crime.

And this is where the comparison becomes unavoidable.

A single 419 scam might net a few thousand dollars. Sometimes less. Occasionally more.

Corporate wealth crimes move millions. Billions. Entire pension systems. National economies.

One café boy catches one fish and feeds his family.
One corporation casts a net over entire markets and feeds people who were already full.

Yet only one of these is treated as an existential moral threat.

That isn’t ethics. It’s class enforcement.

Defenders of corporate crime often retreat to intent. “It wasn’t intentional,” they say. “It was systemic.”

Good. Then we agree.

Because 419 is also systemic. It arises from imposed poverty, blocked mobility, historic extraction, and global financial asymmetry. The difference is that corporate crime gets to hide behind complexity, while individual crime gets personalized, racialized, and moralized.

When a corporation lies, it’s “market incentives.”
When a poor Black man lies, it’s “moral decay.”

Same verb. Different consequences.

This is why the West needs 419 to be evil.

Acknowledging the parallel would force an admission that fraud isn’t a deviation from capitalism, but one of its core features. That legality tracks power, not morality. That “crime” often just means unsanctioned redistribution.

Calling 419 barbaric preserves the fantasy that wealth at the top is clean, deserved, and earned.

It isn’t.
It’s just laundered.

None of this is an argument that scamming retirees is good. That’s the wrong question, asked on purpose.

The real question is sharper and more dangerous:

If deception to extract wealth is immoral, then why is it only condemned when practiced by the global poor?

If legality is the measure of morality, then morality is just another commodity, priced out of reach for anyone without lawyers.

And if the global economy were even remotely fair, 419 emails would vanish overnight.

They haven’t.
Because the system that produced them is still very much alive.

So when a café boy sends an email and gets $2,000, he’s a criminal.
When a corporation engineers a system that extracts $2 billion and pays a $20 million fine, it’s “market behavior.”

Same action.
Different uniform.