₦airaland Forum

Saecula:
Lately there have been torrents of inanities being posted on this site in the name of comments and topics. The way they ask popcock questions or create gibberish topics connotes that they are immature. It has been nightmarish trying to squeeze out a modicum of meaning from those facile and shallow rejoinders. It is indubitable that children or without denigration, underaged teens with Nokia N70 or 3110c are the perpetrators of this execrable gaffe and faux paxes. Now that I am bereft of fortitude to bear this pestilential acts by this sites juvenile reprobates and errants, I can't but remonstrate now before it exacerbates. Shalom!

, you come off like Hon. Patrick's wanna-be with all that verbosity and jejune style similar to a child making an attempt to impress. What could be more childish? Your writing style or your complaints? You pick one!

Aganga is all hype! Soludo will will piss on him if he dares it. Forget the big name and cert, Aganga has not been impressive at all, his performance so far has been very very disapointing.

Mehn that response from Soludo was straight on point. With regards to the economy, I think the minister is selling us a barbie doll and not the real chick! They claim the economy is growing at %7.5 yet we see contradictions in the skyrocketing depletion of our external reserve and nothing concrete to corroborate it except the artificial explanation from the minister. It is even more annoying when he tries to defend the huge percentage alloted to just recurrent spendings in the budget. If there is one thing Aganga does not have, it is guts! The man lacks it, it was so obvious when he and Sanusi were called upon to defend the figures Sanusi alleged was the percentarage being spent by the NA alone.
Soludo may have made some mistakes during his tenure as a result of his actions or in-actions but one thing all will ve to agree is that he had a clear understanding of what he was doing, he inspired confidence and was a performer. Agangu to me is giving me the jitters everytime he makes a move, he is too evasive and vague in his plans.

Bobajo:
So indulge us. State side by side the works they have done. State the statistics, the academic papers you culled this assertion from. Don't for the love of Uncle Ezeuche make such a general statement. You have to convince me (us) with the facts, otherwise you are just blowing hot air.

I dont think you realize who you are dealing with, am the last person to indulge you in your beloved subtle bigotry. The onus is on you to prove the assertion wrong instead of throwing childish tantrums like a kid whose candy has been snatched.

Bobajo:
On what basis has EzeUche made this assertion. The last time i checked, it was Wole Soyinka who won the Nobel Prize. What exactly has Chinua Achebe done to make him the most famous Nigerian (writing Things Fall Apart), or being an economic/political refuge in the US all these years. Please dont write nonsense in the quest to defend a tribal positions. 'Facts milord, Facts, or forever keep your peace'.

, Chinua Acheba is more internationally famous than Wole Soyinka with regards to their works, when was the last time Wole Soyinla even did any serious literary work? It is you who needs to get your facts right.

Finally, it takes humility and finesse to do what ruggedy did. Some other artistes would ve worsen the case by taking dumb moves like 9ice did. He knew that taking an older yoruba man of Gbenga Adeyinka's standing with him will do the magic. It is not about relevance and that is where I think Mr 9ice got it all wrong, you must learn to give respect to people that ve been in the game b4 you no matter what, sometimes that respect could mean keeping shut even when you feel like laying it out. That's how adults behave not making music that give room for silly insinuations.

Aigbofa:
Weren't you here a while ago, also defending another ibo criminal who "miraculously" found an oil well inside his factory? I bet that one was also a genius.

How much brain power do you need to pull off a scam if you had worked in a bank ( as a loan officer ) and know how the system worked?
All you need is a criminal mind, and that is never in short supply in Nigeria.

. . . . Igbo criminal??. . . . . you just like to be uneccessarily combative and see every issue through a jaundiced lens of bigotry, dont you get tired of all that nonsense? I bet John Shittu too was Igbo!
Like I said before am not here to sermonize about the young man's way of a life, everyone can't be legit that is why governments create the "Force" to curtail such. I am more interested in the ingenious finesse with which these crimes where commited. I know your surname is Eistein but it does not make you any different from an average person that is doing thesame thing as you, it takes a gifted mind to do it differently and that is what Tobechi has, deal with it.

pro01:
I'm convinced that some people must have failed English comprehension woefully in school. And yet they argue so blindly.

. . .the gurl is suffering from Senile Dementia! That is what happens when ppl are so consumed and obsessed with seeing thier own prints on screen even if it some shitty clueless nonsense. Initially, she claimed Dude was from Anambra State. . . .lol

ASL33:
Is mama gee a robot?

perhaps a schizophrenic Robot. . .lol

Safego and fstranger com'on guyz! This is not your usual fraudulent scheme by Nigerians, I too do not think you need any type of smarts to pull those off-all they need is a gullible, greedy and equally exploitative mur4cka to fall for em- but Tobe's scheme has genius written all over it. No matter what you think, what he did takes more than a flawed banking & credit system to achieve. Let me break it down a little;
1. This guy's methods are systematic, he gathers information as well as the account details of his victims.
2.This dude & his crew then profile their victims by making serious tasking online research using databases & professional websites to harvest & piece together information.
3.This profile is then given to a second group who call the banks and poses as the account holders.
Now this is where I see the genius-"Onwuhara orchestrated his swindles using information about homeowners that is widely available online. In fragments, this information is innocuous. When assembled properly, it can be used like an electronic skeleton key to get into almost any credit account"-the fact he was able to do it? Mehn! No wonder he was described as a digital scavenger of extraordinary creativity & guile.Even looking at his background tells you the guy has just as good education as any privileged kid would, he aint your average yahoo boy that sends silly mails, Tobe is very smart & has a mind that can grasp very complex concepts.
Now let's take a look at how detailed & elaborate his scheme was;
1.he'd collect mortgage information on married couples with million-dollar homes. They qualified for high HELOCs. He'd find lease or loan papers through public databases and pay sites, then use Photoshop to grab homeowners' signatures off documents.
2.Next, he'd build a profile of the victim by paying for a background search through skip-tracing sites. That would give him birth dates, Social Security numbers, names of relatives, previous addresses, employment histories, and more. To get a mother's maiden name he would use Ancestry.com. (Tell me this dude is not thorough and savvy?)
3.Profile in hand, he would run a credit check on victims through annualcreditreport.com, a website set up by the big three credit-reporting agencies. (Of course it takes a knowledgeable person to understand those boring charts & numerous figures flying up & down in such reports). Onwuhara had discovered a flaw in the Experian portion of the site, which screened users with a personalized security question and several multiple-choice answers. Users had to click on the correct answer to proceed. But when Onwuhara refreshed his browser, he found that the site replaced certain answers with new ones. Clearly, these were red herrings. Onwuhara knew the correct answer to the security question would appear persistently on screen as he refreshed. Enough refreshing would eventually reveal the true answer and allow Onwuhara to access reports. (A spokesman for Experian says that the company is cooperating with law enforcement authorities and that "since this case we have refined our security protocol." "hahahahahaha. . . . .lame excuse to cover up their lapses, it took an extraordinary Tobe to help them realize that"
The reports provided Onwuhara with details about the victim's HELOC. He preferred credit union HELOCs: They were soft targets.
4. At this point artistry came into play. Onwuhara used a phone service called SpoofCard to make any number he wanted appear in a caller ID. This was key to his scam. With SpoofCard, Onwuhara could fool financial institutions into thinking his call originated from the victim's phone. Onwuhara knew the system. He knew the questions he'd get. Usually he had the answers, along with account numbers, balances, and passwords. Altering his gravelly voice like a professional actor, he could switch ethnicity, age, and accent on a whim. A customer service rep was easy prey. That boy is your avareage 27yrs old jor!
5. Once in, Onwuhara would wire HELOC money out of the country. Financial institutions faxed wire transfer requests to his e-fax account, which converted faxes to e-mails. After attaching Photoshopped signatures and phony headers, he would send the forms back. The money would be wired to banks in Asia where mules that Onwuhara had recruited would withdraw the money, take a cut, and redeposit the funds into other accounts or with hawalas, informal money brokers who ask few questions. . . Kid has got brains mehn!
6.Finally, the money would be wired back to the U.S. into accounts Onwuhara controlled. At one point he received a 40- million-euro transfer. He would further launder the money by depositing it in casinos and cashing out in checks days later. He would also buy ultra-expensive luxury cars, drive them for a few months, then ship them to Nigeria, where they would be resold at a steep markup. Onwuhara was clearing about $7 million every two weeks, according to the FBI.
7. The mastermind shared few details of the scam, even with his inner circle. Precious Matthews and Paula Gipson knew the most, mainly because Onwuhara couldn't impersonate women on the phone. He needed them to pose as female account holders and had to give them more information. Obviously, dude has been reading Robert Green's 48 Laws of power.
Any that wants to downplay this is doing so from the standpoint of pure, undiluted Jelousy, like Riley will say,
"you are just mad cos u didn't think of it first"

Mehn to say this story awed me is an understatement. I am not the type to be easily impressed but damn it! Tobechi swept me off with an unequal smartness. If you say that was not a feat to talk about, then may be you should go and try cooking up a scheme that will get you a dollar let alone a whooping $44m geez! This guy's life is like one of em Scarface, Robert De Nairo, Denzel guys, he is that kinda crook. I mean you ve got to give it to him; he is sleek, extremely sophisticated, has an unmatched finsse, technical savvy and artistry of a beautiful mind and a very good knowledge of the American Banking and Credit System. You have got to love him no matter what mehn. Tell me you wanted Denze dead in American Gangstar or Crazy Al pacino in Scarface or even Robert De Neiro in catch me if u can-dead, of course not that's how I view this. Call me wierd and morally bankrupt, I dont care but know this, "Behind every greath wealth is a great crime story!

FORTUNE -- A luxury suite at the W Hotel
in Dallas is as good a place as any to
conquer the world. At least it seemed that
way in 2007 when Tobechi Onwuhara got
the crew together. They'd meet there
often, seven or eight of them. Some had
nicknames from the Ian Fleming lexicon:
C, Q, and E. Others were called Mookie,
Orji, Uche. They would spread out on
designer sofas and at the wet bar, open
three-ring binders, and fire up laptops
with hard-to-trace wireless cards. On a
nearby table there'd be prepaid
cellphones with area codes taped to
them. A phone for Southern California. A
phone for Northern Virginia. A phone for
any place Onwuhara had found the "good
money."
In those days, the good money wasn't
hard to find. The housing boom had
flooded the country with capital. Lenders
were making promiscuous loans to
unsophisticated borrowers. It was an
ideal environment for Onwuhara, 27, a
brilliant, pug-faced visionary who favored
True Religion jeans and Ed Hardy shirts.
Looking out over the neon skyline of
downtown Dallas, it was easy for the
crew to believe his assurances: He'd
make them rich. When the sun glinted off
one of his $100,000 diamond-encrusted
Audemars Piguet watches, who could
doubt it? Every few months he would buy
a new Maserati or Bentley. He owned
expensive properties in Miami, Dallas,
and Phoenix. He even had a secret love
condo in the W, where scantily clad
women visited in such numbers that one
bellhop became convinced that the first-
generation Nigerian-American was a
porn director.
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The truth was very different. In his
ancestral homeland, Onwuhara might
have been a chief. In America he became
one of the world's most successful
cyberscammers, a criminal genius who
used his talents to filet a poorly regulated
banking and credit system. In less than
three years Onwuhara stole a confirmed
$44 million, according to the FBI, which
believes the total may be anywhere from
$80 million to $100 million. All he needed
was an Internet connection and a
cellphone.
Onwuhara called it "washing." He'd set up
a boiler room in a fancy hotel (the
Waldorf-Astoria was another favorite) to
wash information on wealthy victims.
Then he'd wash bank accounts. One
group in his crew would do online
research using databases and websites
to harvest names, dates of birth, and
mortgage information. They'd build
profiles of victims for a second group,
who would call banks posing as account
holders. The callers cadged security
information and passwords. Then
Onwuhara would breach the accounts
and wire funds from them to a network of
money mules he had established in Asia.
The money would be laundered and
wired back to his accounts in the U.S.
"I call it modern-day bank robbery," says
FBI special agent Michael Nail. "You can
sit at home in your PJs and slippers with a
laptop, and you can actually rob a bank."
Onwuhara specialized in hitting home
equity lines of credit (HELOCs), the
reservoirs of cash that banks make
available to homeowners. Once
Onwuhara gained access to a HELOC, he
could siphon out vast sums in seconds.
His weapon was persuasion. It got him
enough money to start building a
colonnaded fortress in Nigeria; enough to
gamble at the high-stakes tables in Vegas
casinos all night. Even his accomplices
appear not to have known how much he
was really pulling down -- not even his
beautiful fiancée, Precious Matthews.
"He was playing all of us," says Paula
Gipson, a member of the crew. "The
banks, us, Precious, everybody."
Conversations with Gipson and other
Onwuhara associates, interviews with
his family and with investigators, and
hundreds of pages of court documents
reveal a digital scavenger of
extraordinary creativity and guile.
Onwuhara orchestrated his swindles
using information about homeowners
that is widely available online. In
fragments, this information is innocuous.
When assembled properly, it can be used
like an electronic skeleton key to get into
almost any credit account. Onwuhara
needed only a few short years to rack up
an illicit fortune. And he's still at large.
The son of an entrepreneur
The state of Abia in Nigeria stretches
from the plains in the north to the
riverine flats in the south and resembles,
on a map, a giraffe's head. It is a swath of
farmland filled with yam fields, cashew
orchards, and the sorrowful memories of
the Igbo people. The Igbo are Christian,
but they jokingly call themselves "black
Jews" because so many leave home to
establish themselves in business. Abia is
their heartland. In the late 1960s it was
part of Biafra, a secessionist state with
the misfortune of sitting atop vast oil
deposits. When the Nigerian civil war
erupted, more than a million Biafrans
were killed or starved to death.
Onwuhara's parents survived.
His father, Doris, was an entrepreneur,
one of the first people in Nigeria to import
satellite TVs. He built the first major hotel
in Abia's capital, Umuahia. Visitors came
from miles away to dance in the hotel's
nightclub. As Umuahia expanded and
land values appreciated, so did Doris's
influence. He moved into politics, held
office, and managed a successful
campaign for a governor of Abia.
Onwuhara's mother, Katherine, was
equally accomplished. A lawyer and
literary critic, she served as chairwoman
of Abia's board of education. The four
daughters she had with Doris would go
on to be nurses and ministers. But her
fifth child, her only son, would be
different. He would be American.
Katherine was five months pregnant with
Tobechi when she left Nigeria to attend
school in Houston. "Tobe" was born there
in 1979.
Katherine returned to Nigeria when Tobe
was still a boy, leaving him with an uncle
in Houston. She thought the tight-knit
diaspora would look after him. But once
Tobe reached his teenage years he
started skipping school and getting into
trouble. The family shipped him back to
Nigeria at age 15 and enrolled him in a
boarding school run by the Marist
Brothers, a Catholic order known for
educational discipline. Onwuhara
graduated and enrolled in medical school
at Abia State University. He was by all
accounts an exceptionally clever, shy boy
who spoke infrequently but eloquently.
He longed to return to the U.S.
In 1999, Onwuhara moved back to Texas.
He rented an apartment in Dallas and
took classes at Brookhaven College. He
found a job as a loan officer at Capital One
( COF, Fortune 500). He learned how
banks worked from the inside, studying
documents and procedures. (Capital One
declines to discuss Onwuhara.) Then he
turned to crime. With the help of a friend
who had connections at Discover
Financial Services ( DFS, Fortune 500),
Onwuhara cooked up driver's licenses
and credit cards under the names of real
customers, according to court
documents. He bought electronics at
CompUSA. He hit up restaurants and
clubs. That was how he met Precious
Matthews, a pretty Baylor student
majoring in speech communication.
Matthews worked as a waitress;
Onwuhara was a regular, flirtatious
customer. When Precious warned him
the establishment was suspicious of his
transactions, Onwuhara was smitten.
The two started dating and were soon
engaged.
In 2002, Onwuhara was arrested three
times in Texas for credit card fraud. The
police raided his apartment and found
incriminating evidence. Onwuhara had
mastered some techniques of identity
theft and stolen more than $100,000
with an accomplice, according to a
statement he gave to the authorities, but
he was still a fledgling criminal making
silly mistakes. Chief among them was
going into a store or a bank in person to
commit fraud. He would learn later to
distance himself from a crime and leave
few traces of his involvement. But not
yet.
When the heat in Texas got too great,
Onwuhara left for Seattle to meet Abel
Nnabue, a Nigerian friend known as "Q."
On Dec. 12, 2002, the two men drove to a
bank in Lynwood, Wash., their wallets
packed with fake IDs and unauthorized
credit cards. Nnabue waited in their gold
Plymouth Neon rental car while
Onwuhara entered the bank to try for a $
5,000 cash advance. When the bank
called the police, Onwuhara bolted
outside and into the Neon, just as a
cruiser arrived. Nnabue sped away on
wet streets, gunning the Neon through
stop signs. Two more cop cars joined the
chase; Onwuhara threw his wallet out
the window. The police cornered the men
in the parking lot of a Korean church.
Onwuhara fled on foot, and a K-9 unit
found him hiding in a pond. In May 2003
he was sentenced to 12 months in prison.
"I'm deeply and sincerely sorry," he told a
federal judge. "You'll never again see me
in any kind of trouble with the law or hear
anything negative about me from this
day forward."
By the time Onwuhara got out of prison,
the housing market was bubbling.
"He made it thunderstorm."
The Dallas Gentlemen's Club is one of
Texas's bawdiest fleshpots, a highway-
side warehouse of grinding booty and
slack-jawed marks. The club attracts big
spenders -- athletes, rap stars -- but
Onwuhara made them look like flunkies.
When he walked in, the strippers would
beeline for him, their cellphones lighting
up as they called their off-duty friends:
"Get over here! T just showed up!" They
knew what to expect -- $650 bottles of
Cristal, $2,000 stacks of ones for his
entourage, $50,000 in a briefcase he'd
empty out. During a single song, he'd drop
so much money the girls needed two
more songs to scoop all the bills off the
floor. He'd repeat this performance
several times a week.
"He didn't just make it rain," one dancer
would later tell the authorities. "He made
it thunderstorm."
At the end of the night, Onwuhara liked to
idle outside the club in his $300,000
Rolls-Royce Phantom waiting for the girls
to exit, according to interviews with FBI
investigators. When he saw one he liked,
he'd simply point. She was coming back to
the W. If women were his weakness,
strippers were his vice. But Precious
would eventually find out. Still engaged,
she and Onwuhara had moved in
together.
The studious, soft-spoken Tobe had
disappeared. Onwuhara, now known as
"T," was the owner of S.W.A.T. Up
Entertainment, a rap label; a deluxe
apartment in Dallas and a mansion in
Miramar, Fla.; and a diamond chain the
size of a tow rope that he wore around his
neck. Dangling at the end of the chain
was a grinning mini-T clutching sacks of
money like a cartoon bank robber, which
is what Onwuhara increasingly
resembled.
In hindsight, it seems obvious that a
savvy cybercriminal would target
HELOCs. From 1998 to 2007, the
percentage of homeowners with HELOCs
jumped from 10.6% to 18.4%. Credit
balances soared. All the information a
scammer needed was available online.
The trick was cobbling it together.
Onwuhara taught himself how.
Using ListSource, a direct-marketing
company, he'd collect mortgage
information on married couples with
million-dollar homes. They qualified for
high HELOCs. He'd find lease or loan
papers through public databases and pay
sites, then use Photoshop to grab
homeowners' signatures off documents.
Next, he'd build a profile of the victim by
paying for a background search through
skip-tracing sites. That would give him
birth dates, Social Security numbers,
names of relatives, previous addresses,
employment histories, and more. To get a
mother's maiden name he would use
Ancestry.com.
Profile in hand, he would run a credit
check on victims through
annualcreditreport.com, a website set up
by the big three credit-reporting
agencies. Onwuhara had discovered a
flaw in the Experian portion of the site,
which screened users with a
personalized security question and
several multiple-choice answers. Users
had to click on the correct answer to
proceed. But when Onwuhara refreshed
his browser, he found that the site
replaced certain answers with new ones.
Clearly, these were red herrings.
Onwuhara knew the correct answer to
the security question would appear
persistently on screen as he refreshed.
Enough refreshing would eventually
reveal the true answer and allow
Onwuhara to access reports. (A
spokesman for Experian says that the
company is cooperating with law
enforcement authorities and that "since
this case we have refined our security
protocol." The reports provided
Onwuhara with details about the victim's
HELOC. He preferred credit union
HELOCs: They were soft targets.
At this point artistry came into play.
Onwuhara used a phone service called
SpoofCard to make any number he
wanted appear in a caller ID. This was key
to his scam. With SpoofCard, Onwuhara
could fool financial institutions into
thinking his call originated from the
victim's phone. Onwuhara knew the
system. He knew the questions he'd get.
Usually he had the answers, along with
account numbers, balances, and
passwords. Altering his gravelly voice like
a professional actor, he could switch
ethnicity, age, and accent on a whim. A
customer service rep was easy prey.
Once in, Onwuhara would wire HELOC
money out of the country. Financial
institutions faxed wire transfer requests
to his e-fax account, which converted
faxes to e-mails. After attaching
Photoshopped signatures and phony
headers, he would send the forms back.
The money would be wired to banks in
Asia where mules that Onwuhara had
recruited would withdraw the money,
take a cut, and redeposit the funds into
other accounts or with hawalas, informal
money brokers who ask few questions.
Finally, the money would be wired back to
the U.S. into accounts Onwuhara
controlled. At one point he received a 40-
million-euro transfer. He would further
launder the money by depositing it in
casinos and cashing out in checks days
later. He would also buy ultra-expensive
luxury cars, drive them for a few months,
then ship them to Nigeria, where they
would be resold at a steep markup.
Onwuhara was clearing about $7 million
every two weeks, according to the FBI.
The mastermind shared few details of the
scam, even with his inner circle. Precious
Matthews and Paula Gipson knew the
most, mainly because Onwuhara couldn't
impersonate women on the phone. He
needed them to pose as female account
holders and had to give them more
information. Nnabue gathered mortgage
information and loan documents. Ezenwa
("E" Onyedebelu, a promising young
student from Dallas whom Onwuhara
had tapped as his protégé, laundered
money. Henry Obilo, a hulking pre-med
student who doubled as Onwuhara's
bodyguard, specialized in Bank of
America ( BAC, Fortune 500) information.
Onwuhara doled out profits according to
a person's role. Callers received more
than researchers, and members of the
crew competed to work the phones. If
they weren't slick enough, Onwuhara
bumped them back to online scutwork. All
the money, all the information, ran
through him. He never stored sensitive
data on his computer, keeping it instead
on a flash drive he could easily destroy.
But no matter the precautions he took to
cover his tracks, something was bound to
go awry. Sometimes you just hit the
wrong man.
The net tightens
On Dec. 8, 2007, Robert "Duke" Short sat
down in front of his PC. It was around 10
a.m., a few hours before Short was to take
his wife to their regular weekend lunch
near their home in Alexandria, Va. Short
wanted to check his accounts at the U.S.
Senate Federal Credit Union. A former
U.S. Treasury agent, Short arrived in D.C.
from South Carolina as the Treasury
Department's national chief of
investigations. He got into politics and
became Strom Thurmond's chief of staff.
He spent 30 years on Capitol Hill. He was,
in other words, the wrong man to hit.
That morning, Short couldn't log into his
account. His password had been
changed, and the credit union was
closed. Short called in on Monday. When
he accessed his account, he saw that $
280,000 was missing, most of it from his
high-limit HELOC account.
"They said this money was transferred to
Korea," he recalls. "They said, 'Are you
sure you didn't do that?' I said, 'Listen, if
that amount of money was transferred to
Korea, I would know.'"
The credit union would protect Short
from any losses -- in fact, almost all of
Onwuhara's victims eventually had their
monetary losses covered by their
financial institutions, although they still
had to cope with the shock of identity
theft and ruined credit ratings.
Short called the Alexandria police
department, the Secret Service, and the
FBI. Within days an investigation was
underway.
The investigators' first clue came from
the IP addresses used to log in to Short's
account. The FBI determined that
someone had called the credit union to
reset Short's password, sounding like an
older white man. The caller claimed that
the auto login to his account had
vanished after his son had set up a new
computer for him. He was convincing. But
after the password was reset, the caller
logged in to Short's account while still on
the phone. The FBI now had a precise IP
address to track. It belonged to a Verizon
Wireless Internet card registered to a
fictitious name and a real address in
Miramar, Fla., just a few doors down from
Onwuhara's mansion, a fact the FBI
would discover later.
Onwuhara bought wireless Internet
service with prepaid debit cards, making
him virtually untraceable. But he still had
to go to a Verizon ( VZ, Fortune 500) store
to make purchases. Two deposits had
been made to the Verizon account tied to
the Short crime. Both occurred in Plano,
Texas. When investigators pulled
security video from the store, they saw
three men at a kiosk. One was wearing an
Ed Hardy hoodie covered in rhinestone
skulls. Investigators began looking for
names.
They knew their thief had intercepted a
call from the credit union to Short to
confirm the wire transfer. Onwuhara had
duped Short's phone company into
remotely forwarding calls to Onwuhara's
cell, a tactic he used often. But it
backfired when investigators obtained a
list of phones to which customers' home
numbers were being forwarded. On the
list, they found numerous prepaid phone
numbers. Calls were being made from
these numbers to banks across the
country and to 1-800 numbers belonging
to SpoofCard. These were the scammers'
virtual fingerprints.
An FBI search warrant produced 1,500
recorded calls connected to the
suspicious SpoofCard accounts.
(SpoofCard says that it doesn't routinely
record calls made over its system, but
that callers may opt to do so.) The tapes
were a jackpot for investigators. "There
were so many different voices," says FBI
special agent Hadley Etienne. "They all
knew what to say. They all had it down."
For months investigators listened to the
tapes, hoping for a break. "You know how
it is when you're reading a good book and
you're just reading and reading and
reading," says Michael Nail, the lead FBI
investigator. "It was like that. I was at
home one weekend listening to calls. And
this one call came up."
In it, Onwuhara does a pitch-perfect
impersonation of a middle-aged white
doctor calling in a prescription to a CVS
( CVS, Fortune 500) pharmacy. The
prescription was for Valtrex, a herpes
medication. The patient was Tobe
Onwuhara. At last, investigators had a
name. They pulled a Texas DMV photo of
Onwuhara. It matched the image of the
man in the hoodie from the Verizon video.
Their quarry was in reach, but they
needed more evidence.
In April 2008, agents detained Onwuhara,
Nnabue, Matthews, and Obilo at J.F.K.
International Airport in New York. The
group was flying home after a vacation in
Nigeria. They had stayed at the Ritz in
London during their stopover. Onwuhara
had even brought his diamond chain.
Investigators told the scammers they
were being stopped as part of a routine
travel check. Their real purpose was to
confirm the voices and nicknames they'd
heard on the tapes and the phone
numbers used in the calls. Now they
would begin to monitor Onwuhara's
phone and station cars in the street
outside his Miramar mansion to conduct
surveillance.
The crew starts to unravel
If the airport stop rattled Onwuhara, he
didn't show it. He still ate fish and rice at
Pappadeaux's in Dallas. He still threw
parties at the chic Ghost Bar on the roof
of the W. But nerves were fraying within
his crew, according to Paula Gipson.
Nnabue complained about his pay. Gipson
agonized over her crimes yet justified
them by saying she was only hurting the
banks. Matthews spiraled into a
depression. She enjoyed the finer things
Onwuhara provided her -- shopping
sprees at high-end stores, weekends in
the best hotels, a house with a new pool
-- but their relationship had grown
combustible. She and Onwuhara fought.
After one argument he stormed through
the Miramar house and smashed the
screens of the plasma TVs.
It was around this time that Onwuhara
grew suspicious that law enforcement
might be on to him. FBI agents had placed
both a pen register and a trap-and-trace
device on his phone, which let them
record all outgoing and incoming
numbers. Onwuhara somehow found
out. When he called Cingular/AT&T ( T,
Fortune 500), his cellphone carrier, the
company "accidentally" revealed the
name and number of the FBI technician
tracking him, according to an FBI affidavit
in support of a criminal complaint. But
people who know Onwuhara don't think it
was an accident.
"He has a way of getting people to tell him
everything," Gipson says.
On July 30, 2008, he destroyed his cell
and switched to another phone the FBI
wasn't monitoring.
The FBI didn't know where he'd gone. Was
he making an escape? Emergency arrest
warrants were obtained. Two days later,
on a perfect South Florida night, the
agents watching Onwuhara's house
noticed a commotion. Matthews ran
outside, followed by a familiar-looking
man. Matthews sped away in her Acura.
The man followed in a black BMW X6
registered to Onwuhara. The agents gave
chase as the cars rocketed down the
highway at more than 100 mph.
"I got some calls," Nail says. "They were
like, 'Hey, they're speeding. Should we
stop them now?'"
Nail consulted Etienne and the assistant
U.S. attorney on the case. They decided
to make the arrest. The agents on the
ground followed the speeding cars to the
Hard Rock Casino in Fort Lauderdale. The
Acura and the BMW screeched to a halt at
the curb in front of the casino. The
drivers rushed inside, where local police
detained them. The man from the BMW
wasn't Onwuhara but rather his protégé,
Ezenwa Onyedebelu. In the seconds
before the FBI arrived with handcuffs to
make the arrest, Matthews whipped out
her cellphone and fired off a text: "Leave
now. They got us."
Somewhere inside the Hard Rock, maybe
at one of his beloved craps tables, one of
the greatest cyberscammers in history
looked up from his phone, calmly headed
for a back door, and hailed a cab. Then he
melted into the night. He hasn't been
seen since.
Floating between worlds
"I was taught by my dad not to be a
follower," Onwuhara once said.
He is following his own treacherous path
now, one that few have charted. A most-
wanted fugitive, he has a $25,000
bounty on his head.
Almost all of Onwuhara's co-conspirators
were indicted and pleaded guilty.
Precious Matthews was sentenced to 51
months in prison. Daniel "Orji" Orjinta got
42 months. Abel Nnabue had his
sentence reduced to 27 months after
cooperating with prosecutors. Paula
Gipson and Ezenwa Onyedebelu helped
prosecutors and had their sentences
reduced to 15 months and 14 months,
respectively. Only Henry Obilo pleaded
not guilty. He was sentenced to 88
months in prison.
As for Onwuhara, the FBI claims to have
no clue where he is. One accomplice
swears he's still in America. Maybe he's
floating between worlds in cyberspace,
probing for new cracks in new systems.
"The boy is an enigma," says one of his
sisters. "What can I tell you?"

Let us get something straight here, that portfolio is not a new creation, it was there before, infact, Abiola's daughter was the one heading it until this announcement. I am Igbo myself and am passionate about my Identity but I dont think there is any justification for that position in the 1st place. The issue here is not Bianca's appointment( because any political strategist will tell u it has its point if u look at the potentials of such to his acceptance to the igbos) the problem here is why do we ve such an office in the first place. It is causing so much uproar now because it is Bianca, Ojukwu's wife. People should take a chill pill and argue with perspective, all these issues about GEJ wanting to habe Bianca is preposterous and the forte of mentally lazy ppl that would rather indulge in small talks than intelligently analysing issues.

[quote author=~Bluetooth link=topic=592764.msg7607987#msg7607987 date=1296060428]Stop lying against the dead.Osisi operated from an evil forest which means the place must be situated in the wild.[/quote]What? Did u just post this poo? Mehn, this discussion has just come to an abrupt end. Am talking to a senile kid that lacks the ability to reason like everyone else, guy go play with canters jare!

[quote author=~Bluetooth link=topic=592764.msg7607764#msg7607764 date=1296058053]Ode

The last time i checked,osisikanku was operating from an evil forest.how is that evil forest different from the one we are talking about here ?[/quote]You reason like an ediot! So because osisikankwu hid in a forest, it makes it evil? I bet there are no forests in Yoruba land, Ur village has skyscrappers similar to those in New York and Shangai.

Some of these dumb Nigerian journalists like to unneccessarily exaggerate or just engage in needless journalistic embelishments. There is a big difference between a place that is sparsely populated, remote and dotted with thick vegetions and an "evil forest" as stupidly assumed by the writer. If the place was actually a forest how come ppl knew thier way to the place and even registered up to 200 or so, yet it is an evil forest that know one dares to even see it let alone go there to vote. What about the electoral officers and agents that ve been doing their job there for the past 10 days? Is the writer implying they ve no sense of security that they will allow themselves such risks? Com'on we are not fools now, what is the bone of contention here? Is it that more machines and electoral materials were assigned to a remote and sparsely porpulated area due to the influence of some overzealous politician in the area or that the machines and electoral materials are located in a supposed evil forest? What in God's name is an evil forest by the way? People just like to throw up stupid brainless conjectures to cause diversion from the real issue. Abeg make person hear word jare! Very soon now, i go hear say one yeye copy & paste journalist wrote an article about the reg exercise in my village and passed it off as an evil forest as well, Lameducks!

asha 80:
are u guys sure ileke idi is a woman?i have never see any woman so much involved in things like this.

Do you blame the senile Bimbo? Since she can't get a job in real life, she now spends most part of her useless time spewing bullocks and making herself porpular for the wrong reasons. That is what Nairaland can do to an average person when they fail to draw the line and obsess themselves with frivolities, now her past time job is prowling 24hr and 7days a wk hopping on every thread and plaguing it with her nuisance while others are busy working in real life!

I must admit that dumb quote dude has as his signature quote gets me rolling on the floor, lol, dude do u know what that means in igbo?, "Aigbofa na la Nwoke", whoever told u that quote is hip is as gay as that quote, lol

Atiku is a niusance that no meaningful politician that is worth his salt should even relate with. The man based all his political campaighn on Jonathan and forgot that the election was not about Jonathan but what every contender could do to better the country. Even his opening speech was steeped with complaints, mudslinging, uneccessary personal attacks and endless rants without any single reference to what he plans to do if he became president. That guy is a dumbo, I knew he was going to be crushed like an ant. Ribadu himself is no contender here neither is the relatively unknown Shekaru. Buhari would ve stood a chance if only he was not from thesame stock. And people need to look at the bigger picture here, it is folly and politically naive for oppositions to continue to bash the PDP like they are in the race just to unseat the PDP. Even if PDP lose today, that wont change a thing, thesame Nigerians that we see in the PDP are the ones we see in other parties scattered all over the place with no serious plan or ideology to show they mean what they say, just empty rants, blind attacks, stupid political rhetorics and dumb campaighn slogans that can be forgotten after a sneeze. Jonathan will win the elections not because he is the best candidate but because he is not in denial, he makes himself look human, susceptible to mistakes and manages to surreptituosly look like the political underdog at the end even though he is the incumbent. Atiku is no political heavyweight as he likes to claim, if he was, he could ve at least won in his own state. He is so politically savvy that he was beaten so easily even in core northern states, so much for his much touted experience. Nonsense! Experience in what? Being the vice president? Jonathan was that too and is now the president, so how is he better than a person that has been there and even done more, dumbo! Exactly why he should ve talked less about Jonathan and concentrated on his own plan, delegates are not fools to buy all that crap about his experience, Jonathan was smarter, he appealed to thier interests and won thier support, kappish! Atiku chose to obsess about Jonathan while Jonathan reached a mutual agreement with enough of them to win the primary, Atiku can go and sit down and learn what political savvy is all about, he can now let his ego down cos he does not have it anyway, he lost it with that crushing defeat. Running from pillar to post only makes him look more desperate and a sour loser, let him learn from Hilary, who knows Jonathan might just be magnanimous enough to let the !diot serve in his govt so that he can eat his own shit like he always does.

Atiku is a niusance that no meaningful politician that is worth his salt should even relate with. The man based all his political campaighn on Jonathan and forgot that the election was not about Jonathan but what every contender could do to better the country. Even his opening speech was steeped with complaints, mudslinging, uneccessary personal attacks and endless rants without any single reference to what he plans to do if he became president. That guy is a dumbo, I knew he was going to be crushed like an ant. Ribadu himself is no contender here neither is the relatively unknown Shekaru. Buhari would ve stood a chance if only he was not from thesame stock. And people need to look at the bigger picture here, it is folly and politically naive for oppositions to continue to bash the PDP like they are in the race just to unseat the PDP. Even if PDP lose today, that wont change a thing, thesame Nigerians that we see in the PDP are the ones we see in other parties scattered all over the place with no serious plan or ideology to show they mean what they say, just empty rants, blind attacks, stupid political rhetorics and dumb campaighn slogans that can be forgotten after a sneeze. Jonathan will win the elections not because he is the best candidate but because he is not in denial, he makes himself look human, susceptible to mistakes and manages to surreptituosly look like the political underdog at the end even though he is the incumbent. Atiku is no political heavyweight as he likes to claim, if he was, he could ve at least won in his own state. He is so politically savvy that he was beaten so easily even in core northern states, so much for his much touted experience. Nonsense! Experience in what? Being the vice president? Jonathan was that too and is now the president, so how is he better than a person that has been there and even done more, dumbo! Exactly why he should ve talked less about Jonathan and concentrated on his own plan, delegates are not fools to buy all that crap about his experience, Jonathan was smarter, he appealed to thier interests and won thier support, kappish! Atiku chose to obsess about Jonathan while Jonathan reached a mutual agreement with enough of them to win the primary, Atiku can go and sit down and learn what political savvy is all about, he can now let his ego down cos he does not have it anyway, he lost it with that crushing defeat. Running from pillar to post only makes him look more desperate and a sour loser, let him learn from Hilary, who knows Jonathan might just be magnanimous enough to let the !diot serve in his govt so that he can eat his own shit like he always does.

[quote author=Inked_Nerd link=topic=577281.msg7458013#msg7458013 date=1294132687]
Oh really, I don't know about you but I see couples like that everyday. Here are some images since you seem to be convinced that couples leek that don't exist. [/quote]. . . Hahahahahaha. . This gal sef, U dey jones o! What kind of impressionable person are you self? You call all these professional made for commercials photo shoot pictures of geniune newly weds? Lol. . .come on Lady, I know you are smarter than this na. Besidz, those pairs look like your stereotypical gangbangers, Mobstars, American street thugs and bitches and Average Pacinos in LA selling drugs. . .lol. . Are those your role model couples by the way? I wish you luck with that then. . Hahahahaha

[quote author=Inked_Nerd link=topic=577281.msg7457737#msg7457737 date=1294129075]
Before I answer, I wanna know why you're asking.[/quote]. . . Because I will like to see a couple with all that body paintings and pr!ck$ walk down the aisle some day.

[quote author=Inked_Nerd link=topic=577281.msg7457538#msg7457538 date=1294126162]
Lmfao, oh please.

Yeah, I'm on FB. I don't mind talkin' but I don't feel too comfortable posting my Fb link on Nairaland .

[/quote]. . . Hmmmm. . By the way lady, are you married?[quote author=MzD@rkSkin link=topic=577281.msg7455421#msg7455421 date=1294088185]LMFAO! First of all, if you had any idea why I did it, you wouldn't say such rubbish. Since I was a little girl I have ALWAYS craved to have a piercing and atleast one tatoo by my 21st birthday, and that is what I did. I used to draw out on paper where I want my body art on my body and was well aware of the smirks, sneers and scornful looks of adults when I showed it to them but guess what? regardless of that i STILL have my back tattooed and my nose ring, there are more to come as a matter of a fact. So bottom line, it is not about who likes it and who doesn't, if I LIKE IT, being that it is MY body, it will be done. Period. Do not group me into your need for assimilation, I like to stand out and go against "the grain", I'm not a puppet. And as I said a well groomed (black) man is just as easily stereotyped as one who looks like a thug. In fact to me, the ones in the suits I fear the most because some of the biggest and most notorious crooks world wide have white collar jobs/status, not the petty thugs. Think about that.[/quote]. . . I know how intelligent U can be when arguing your points but this one is an all time low, you come off here like the typical stereotypes that wear those body ostentations. That is exactly the point I was making, racial profiling is very different from stereotyping or typecasting, while the former is usually based on sb's race, the latter is entirely on the needless ostentations of your fashion choice. Just see how you sounded so combative defending yourself and trying to prove otherwise. Is it not a dumb logic to say because either way a blackman wearing suits is no any different from a black man wearing baggysweats sagging on his waist with a hooded top to a whiteman, so regardless you should settle for less. The way an average white racist sees a black person is no pointer to how the society sees him. If a black man appropriately dressed and a whiteman man with all the body ostentations turned up for a job interview in a coperate setting who do you think will leave the place feeling unfair and greatly prejudiced against? If you are decently dressed as a black person, yeah some racists may still want to dishonestly profile but a majority of them wont, however it is different when a person is wearing all that ish look like a walking human painting, be you white or black, people will say the wrong things about you, treat you differently and make both racial and open insults at you. That is the fact!

This topic has spiralled into  jejune discussions of fancy and awe for body art mumbo-jumbo, feel all right and good with your individuality ish. . .yeah yeah yeah, it is hip,sexy,cool, shows individualism. . . bla bla bla. . Whatever mehn! You guys should come back to reality when you re done with all that pep talk and hot air abt how U dont give an Eff. . . Wonder why you lot went for it in the first place if you didn't give a 4ck abt anything.
One will think, the people discussing are residents of red light district in El Dorado town of Utopia, Bullcrap!
As long as you re all humans and you leave in planet earth with human beings and are guided by the morals of societal dictates, you damn well give a 4ck! I dont know why impressionable immigrants in the west always like to conclude that one is not exposed or educated when certain western values or ideas are questioned, rejected or dismissed. So because it is accepted there, it makes it ok for everyone else everywhere irrespective of whether it assaults one's sense of decency or a society's set of acceptable behaviour or morals. Wearing all that tatoos and pearcings all over only tells one thing to a majority of the people you come across(except of course a wanna be or sb that is already doing it or has done it and stopped) you re not decent or have good morals, it does not matter if they are wrong or not about their views of you but that is their mental estimate of your appearance to them. And you wonder why they treat you differently like trash? Or want to take advantage of you sexually? You may not want to care what anyone thinks but society is there to jolt you back into reality and remind you of its rules. Call it profiling, stereotyping but tell me who does not do it? Even you, do it. If you dress like a LovePeddler you will be accorded with the respect given to whores whether in retrospect the person begins to think otherwise of you is useless coz he would ve first made the mistake. You guys should get real abeg and stop gisting like the society is Hollywood where one commando single handedly destroys an army or where a prøstituting Julia Robert hooks up with this debonair rich dude, married him and they lived happily ever after.  Even I as a man do not see anything wrong with people that do it, infact, I find them sexy and hip and the first thing that usually comes to my mind when I see a woman with tatoos and body piercings is usually the prospect of having easy sex with them and from that moment, that usually informs my attitude towards them, I get flirty, shower them with praises, make comments about liking their piercings and tatoos, pretend to like their individuality even go further to ask questions about it like am interested and about to get one. But that is where it ends, no matter how otherwise she tries to prove to me that she is not my average tatoo or piercing typecast, I am hardly convinced, to she is a pretty intelligent freak(i.e in the case she goes all the way to show that she is not my average stereotypical bimbo) because that is all a lot of the averagely intelligent women who wear tatoos and piercings do all the time they meet people-prove to you that they may be wearing all that but they are different from the majority weirdos that do thesame- and my response is usually non-commital, who cares about what you really are, do yourself a favour, take off those screaming body ostentations that makes you look like Marilyn Monroe then may be I will stop fantasizing what is in between those legs and not what is in between those ears.

A monstrous mass murder of
innocent souls has occurred in Jos
again and we are, as always, being
insulted with unimaginative,
flyblown, and soporific platitudes
by our political, media, and clerical
elites. Almost every prominent
Nigerian who has commented on
this heartless, high-tech mass
slaughter has mouthed one of
three predictably ready-made
bromides: oh, this is all about
politics, not religion; it ’s a failure of
security and leadership; and it’s the
consequence of poverty.
This is the safe, standard,
prepackaged rhetorical frippery
that our elites effortlessly
regurgitate whenever violent
communal convulsions erupt in any
part of the country. But this is
getting insufferably trite. If the
hypocrisy or intellectual laziness
that actuates these thoughtless,
simplistic sound bites didn ’t have
far-reaching consequences for our
continued existence as a nation
and, in fact, our very survival as a
people, one would simply yawn in
silence and ignore them.
But it so often happens that after
these hypocritical, clichéd phrases
are uttered, the nation will be
anesthetized into a false sense of
security and normalcy, the culprits
will never be ferreted out much
less punished, and everybody will
go to sleep —until the next
upheaval recrudesces and jolts us
all out of our pigheaded
complacence.
A scene from the bombings in Jos
And then the predictably mind-
numbing, mealy-mouthed
banalities will be invoked again by
the elites to explain away what
happened, and so on and so forth.
This rhetorical formula is safe
because it absolves people in
political and cultural authority from
the triple burdens of thinking,
confronting uncomfortable truths,
and taking action. That ’s why
politicians are often ironically the
first to blame “politicians” for the
episodic fits violence that now
punctuate our national life. Well,
“ politician” is a floating signifier that
encapsulates everybody in politics,
and what refers to everybody
refers to nobody. Case closed.
To be sure, political manipulation,
inept security and leadership, and
poverty are all deeply implicated in
the perpetual cycle of violence and
recriminations that have become
fixtures in our socio-political
landscape. But a murderous
pervasion of religious doctrines and
violent, unthinking ethnic
particularism are even greater
culprits. People who are
brainwashed into believing that
those who don’t share their faith
deserve to be murdered, or people
who are so wedded to their
ethnicity that they lack the
capacity to tolerate others, are just
as dangerous and as culpable —if
not more so— as the politicians
who “manipulate” them.
Poverty, in and of itself, does not
predispose people to violence.
There are much poorer countries in
Africa than Nigeria that are
remarkably peaceful. Take, for an
example, Benin Republic, our
western neighbor. Or Senegal, an
over-90-percent Muslim country
that elected a Roman Catholic as its
first president. And, of course,
security lapses become an issue
only in societies that have a
predisposition to senseless,
unprovoked violence, such as ours.
Now, a group which calls itself
Jama ’atu Ahlus Sunnah Lid Da’awati
Wal Jihad has claimed responsibility
for the deadly bombs
in Jos. It also claims to have
perpetrated its savage murder of
innocents, some of whom may in
fact be Muslims, on behalf of
Muslims and Islam. But the
preponderance of reactions to this
unsettling revelation among our
Muslim leaders and commentators,
including security agencies, has
been to impulsively dismiss the
group ’s claim even when they
have no contrary evidence—much
like Goodluck Jonathan and his
minions unthinkingly exculpated
the Movement for the
Emancipation of the Niger Delta
(MEND) of responsibility for the
October 1 terrorist attacks even
when the group claimed
responsibility for the attacks. Same
attitude, different personalities.
That is the Nigerian story.
One uncomfortable fact that our
elites in northern Nigerian have
been shy to confront meaningfully
and fearlessly is that we do have a
worryingly enervating crisis of
noxious religious literalism. By
religious literalism I mean lazy,
literal, and de-contextualized
reading of religious texts, which
current Central Bank governor
Sanusi Lamido Sanusi almost
singlehandedly fought for several
years in newspaper articles when
he was an ordinary banker. I ’ve
heard so much thoroughgoing hate
and blatant call to murder by local,
often ignored, religious clerics in the
name of sermonizing. These are
unmentionable sermons that will
curdle the blood of any sane
person and cause them to wonder
if they share the same humanity
as these ignorant, homicidal clerics.
Boko Haram ’s leader’s video
justifying and claiming
responsibility for the Jos bombings
is an eerie echo of these hateful
sermons.
But I know these sermons to be
atrociously grotesque perversions
of Islam ’s core teachings because I
am the son of a Muslim scholar who
knows as much about Islam as any
educated Muslim should. My 80-
something-year-old dad taught me
to read and write in Arabic before I
even learned to read in the Roman
alphabet. And my dad’s dad was a
Christian. So were many of his
brothers and sisters. Yet we lived in
peace. My dad always took care to
remind us, like all broadminded
Muslim scholars do or should, that
the references to “unbelievers” in
the Qur’an are not to Christians or
Jews; they are to seventh-century
Arabian idolaters who launched
unprovoked attacks against the
emergent Islamic religion.
Christians and Jews are properly
called “ahlul kitaab” (translated as
“people of the book”) in the Qur’an.
Although the relationship between
early Muslims in the 7th century
and Christians was not without
problems, it was, for the most part,
marked by tolerance as evidenced
in several Qur ’anic verses.
Examples: “Surely those who
believe, and those who are Jews,
and the Christians, and the Sabians
-- whoever believes in God and the
Last Day and does good, they shall
have their reward from their Lord.
And there will be no fear for them,
nor shall they grieve" (2:62, 5:69,
and many other similar verses);
“ [A]nd nearest among them in love
to the believers will you find those
who say, ‘We are Christians,’
because amongst these are men
devoted to learning and men who
have renounced the world, and
they are not arrogant ” (5:82). In
the second verse, you can almost
mentally picture Reverend Hassan
Matthew Kukah and many
(Catholic) priests.
But ignorant, hate-filled, and
hidebound religious literalists have
stripped adherents of other
Abrahamic faiths of their status as
“ people of the book” and have
dressed them in the borrowed
robes of “unbelievers.” And they
are straining hard to make gullible
people believe that all the scriptural
verses about retaliatory aggression
against “unbelievers” in the Qur’an
refer to Christians and Jews.
Unfortunately, these hitherto fringe
perverts of the message of the
Qur ’an are beginning to enjoy a
position of dominance in northern
Nigeria ’s religious discourse, and
many sane, thinking people are
afraid to contradict them, lest they
be tagged as “hypocrites” or
“sympathizers of unbelievers” and
then murdered by their
sympathizers.
I know I speak for millions of silent
Nigerian Muslims when I say that
these blood-thirsty, homicidal
beasts who murdered innocent
men, women, and children in the
name of Islam don ’t represent us.
But until enough Muslim leaders
and commentators come out to
openly denounce these people and
the ideology of hate that animates
them, they will continue to hijack
and appropriate the mainstream,
and we will all pay dearly for this--
literally and symbolically.
But, first, the perpetrators must be
be made to face the consequences
of their murders. Unfortunately,
Goodluck Jonathan has robbed
himself of the moral capital to bring
these murderers to justice because
he also publicly shielded his own
MEND kinsmen
from the consequences of their
own savage terrorism against
Nigeria.
The question is: can we afford to go
on like this, especially now that we
are entering a really dangerous
phase of mutual annihilation
through bombs? Certainly, our
elites ’ habitual, knee-jerk,
platitudinous reactions to
communal violence will hasten our
collective ruination. But we need to
always remember that the
consequences of a violent break-up
won ’t be pretty for everybody.
Tolerance, understanding, and the
acceptance of our diversity are the
only values that can sustain us a
nation.

salamee:
the truth must be told at these trying times. only a good muslim who has the fear of God will condemn such acts sincerely.as one, i totally condemn this acts even though by fellow muslim brothers will not like it, i will say it any way cos it has already been mentioned here and its d truth.
the clause in the quran has given room 4 any body to interprete his own way.


Mohammed first revelation; Islam is a religion of peace

Many of Mohammed’s first revelations tell us the Christians and Jews are God's wonderful people;

(Surah 10:94 And if thou (Muhammad) art in doubt concerning that which We reveal unto thee, then question those (Christians & Jews) who read the Scripture (that was) before thee. Verily the Truth from thy Lord hath come unto thee. So be not thou of the waverers.

Mohammed's second (final) revelation
The Quran tells Muslims to kill the unbelievers wherever they find them (Surah 2.191), murder them and treat them harshly (Surah 9:123), slay them (Surah 9.5), fight with them (Surah 8:65 ), strive against them with great endeavor (Surah 25.52), be stern with them because they belong to hell (Surah 66.9) to strike off their heads; then after making a “wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives” for ransom (Surah 47.4).

This is the reason for much of the confusion within Islam as Muslims will quote you the more loving verses of the earlier revelations while ignoring the facts. However the Islamic fundamentalists know this well and they are condemned to hell by the Quran if they do not follow the last revelations.


(Surah 4:89) They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks,
(Quran 8.12} I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them,

I have done my research on the quran and bible and i have made my decision. all muslim brothers must embrace peace and help in eradicating terror and unjust killing of innocent blood. d radical few have painted all our good deeds black, lets make nigeria a better place because even major islamic nations dont have peace. peace can be attained thu diversity. the truth shall set nigeria free !!!!

. . A honest Muslim brother took his time and shunned the lip-service that a lot of muslims pay to islam and called a spade a spade.
With vague instructions such as these no wonder even very educated muslim converts turn out to be violent and irrational as is seen from people like Mutalab and the Black kid that participated in the london train bombings. A religion of Peace or A religion that is Pissed?

Mr truely
What exactly is your point? Stop quoting people to support your point that I fail to see. There is a big difference between Christianity and Islam, while christians can commit crimes and what ve you, they dont hold the bible as a justification for their acts. Everytime a muslim commits acts of terror on others they hold up the Koran to justify their wickedness. Somebody once asked, if the likes of the Bokoharams and co are clear deviations of what the Koran actually preaches or they are actually the ones living it out in its entirety. I am begining to think the the latter might be true because the generally grave yard credence by Islamic leaders since the bokoharam onslaught is tantamount to a tacit support to these fools. I am sure if Christians had been killing Muslims and bombing their mosques, many of these taciturn muslim leaders would ve turned loquacious on tv holding press conferences and threatening fire and brimstone. The problem is whether these extremists are literate or not, it is the propensity of of the flawed ideology of islam that can turn an average person into a very violent and angry person with convictions to justify his rage. A lot of you hate it when it is pointed out to you in glare terms. What Pat Robertson said was an expression of her own personal opinions not backed by the bible of the ideals of christianity. Am sure an Imam has said sth similar before and backed it up with verses from the Koran.
You lot can continue to delude yourselves about the dangers and potentials of extremism in islam but a lot of us are tired of being scared of blowing up at every hint of an arguement with a muslim. It is high time one looked beyond being political correct and drive home the truth.

[quote author=MzD@rkSkin link=topic=577281.msg7447067#msg7447067 date=1293948769]I've heard similar rubbish sayings like that myself.
I recently got a tatoo, ON MY BACK MIND YOU,
and my mother is like "What about jobs? and if
you are dating, he may not see you as a decent girl!"
I'm like SERIOUSLY?! If he was the right one for me
he would receive me REGARDLESS, i mean wtf?
And which SICK boss would want to see my bare back?
I think it is the old vs. new school mindset really.

I do MY OWN body piercings, and I pierced my nose and my mom
nearly fainted from cursing LOL.[/quote]. . . I see your point but if U look at very well without being youthful with considerations, you would understand your mum's fear. Seriously, people associated with body tatoos and body piercing are most often than not people with very low moral values with no sense of self-restraint and control over their desires and urge. When we were little and we asked for certain things( you know as kids you always want to ve everything the other kids ve and even more) dad would say, "listen kid, I wont avail you that not because I cant but because you need to learn to different what you really need and what you just want and that is what I want you to learn", mum puts it short and indirect, you can have it but not now or may be never. Kids who gets what they want at the minute they ask for it and anything they ask for, most likely end up bad, tatoos, drugs, violence, piercing and all the mean vices one can think of. That is the reason why mum is worried coz you might be crossing the line between your want and your needs, priorities my dear! Socially, such people are stereotyped and looked down as not smart, why will I want to risk that unneccessary headaches when I can still be hip, youthful, smart and beautiful without any of those tatoos and piercings sending the wrong msg to people. Even you as a youth, would you consider the guy with tatoos and body piercings over the guy that chooses to be normal? It all boils down to the presence of control and self-restraints

Pro01 you talk like you would do thesame if afforded thesame opportunity.
Well I cant say for certain that I understand the depth of the situation between Adenuga and Those pensioners so I wont start by raining curses on him or making hasty conclusions based on one part of the story, that will be unfair to the man and will run parallel to the justice that we pursue for this pensioners.
However, it is very inappropriate that more than 70% of his workforce are paid a paltry N3000 if that is true cos honestly I doubt that figure and I know how prepostrous Nigerian writers can be when they are out to achieve an aim, their journalistic embelishments at times makes me sick in the stomach. But if it is very true, then it should be rebuked and Mr Mike should be seriously reprimanded, that is a cruel thing to do. It is one thing for billionairs to be tough and frugal when it comes to cutting cost or not wanting to be exploited by workers and it is another thing to be unneccessarily wicked, Pro0! There is a fine line between them, dont generalize and make vague conclusions without first understanding the depth of the issues. If any billionair practices business the way it is alleged Mr Adenuga does, he will run into serious problems coz he will be so entangled with suits upon suits against him that he will end up settling people at very high expenses than he would ve initially had to. He is not the only one with people in his employ and pay roll, there are even people with more wealth and control of way bigger coperations, nobody goes under at their sight or the mention of their name. I see no reason for the self created mysteries and divinity, people will always respect and fear him no matter what, he does not always ve to demand it like he lacks it.

londoner:
I hope the muslims here who have taken their time to kindly  "educate "us on the peacefulness of Islam have also been busy typing and posting away in Islamic extremist websites, to share with them these teachings.

You need to defend the image of your religion and what it really stands for to THEM rather than us. They are the ones who believe without question that their atrocities are an expression of their "faith". Defend your religion against them, not us.

Or does your need to defend the image of Islam somehow slip away when you have to face a fellow muslim to do it?

. . Spot on sister! The non-muslims they are busy educating are not even interested in whether islam is as soft as wool or not, nobody here( me inclusive) will budge on what we believe about that religion not when the so-called Radical few with a flawed bent of mind are busy wreaking havoc in their society and justifying themselves using the Koran. How many times have they actually engaged these extremists in a serious debate of islamic ideology or correct their misconception of certain vague instructions that are rife in the Koran and can give way to so many interpretations as it has become evident from the goings-on. I ve seen Christians debate over certain doctrines in christiandom, people have challenged the authority of the Pope, irrespective of what history has told us about doing so. Today we ve the protestants-former Roman catholics that protested certain doctrines and then broke away to form their own organized religion in line with their own convictions of the bible. Thesame example is witnessed today by millions of Anglicans who are opposed to samesex marriages and have also decided to cut relations with the leadership of the Cantabury and form their own leadership in line with their own beliefs.
Muslims should learn to be open to issues and no hold-barz debate, that is how to help people to think and use their brains. They should stop being vague all the time with their usual mantra of "Islam is a religion of Peace", unless that serves as a placebo to make them feel all right about themselves and their religion, the reality does not support the cliché, simple!