The Scarcity Trap: Where Scammer and Scammed Collide

It’s not just greed: The global fraud machine fueled by financial need on one side and loneliness on the other, isn’t just about money; it turns on a profound social failure and a devastating paradox, something we explore in depth this week on “What the Hack?”

On the criminal side of the continuum, there is the obvious scarcity of resources—actual money, actual food, actual opportunity. On the victim side, there is often a lack of community, lack of connection, lack of social circle, and lack of support (technical, emotional or both).

Cybercrime emerges here as an inevitable result of fundamental human needs going unmet. The scammer is driven by financial lack, while the scammed is often seeking emotional fulfillment. Scammed and scammer meet in the commonality of scarcity.

This intersection of want—one for material wealth, the other for human contact—is the powerful engine driving a multi-billion-dollar global fraud machine.

We often examine the architecture of this crime phenomenon on “What the Hack?” and this week is a doozy. “Jackals of Trust: A Short History of Cybercrime” features cybercrime expert Gary Warner, Director of Threat Intelligence at DarkTower. We talked about the secret world of Nigerian cybercrime, one dominated not by disorganized thugs, but highly educated professionals who fuse computer science, spiritual ritual, and anti-colonial ideology to pursue a luxury economy built on exploiting loneliness, the explosion of personal information online and vulnerable digital non-natives.

The individuals running the most effective financial frauds are not the products of desperation alone, but the result of a system where education outpaces opportunity. Major West African crime syndicates, known as confraternities, mandate high educational standards. They are often run by graduates of a college program, according to Warner. 

“Many of them have western college degrees from computer science programs,” he told me, “and they often work in organizations that give them unique access and understanding. So, for example, we have members of the confraternities working in banks, working for healthcare companies, working in government agencies…”

This professionalism represents something you’ve heard us talk about on “What the Hack?” It’s the “corporatization of digital theft,” a strategic operation where technical skill is weaponized against global infrastructure. They learn the financial system from the inside, enabling large-scale Business Email Compromise (BEC) and high-end money laundering.

The motivation for these syndicates extends beyond simple greed, rooted in a potent ideological and spiritual framework. These confraternities operate as cultist organizations with formal hierarchies and chief priests. 

This belief system sanctions their criminal actions through ritual. Members engage in what they call a “money blessing,” a ceremony where members of the confraternity bring a sacrifice—which can range from money and alcohol to animals or even humans—to a shaman. This ritual is believed to cause a spiritual blessing to be placed upon their crimes, increasing their success in luring victims.

The spiritual justification is closely tied to a powerful political ideology that views crime against Western entities as a form of justifiable restitution. Drawing on Nigeria’s complex post-colonial history, many members believe they are owed for the theft of natural resources by colonial powers. This ideology provides a powerful, internal rationale: committing crimes against the West is therefore not viewed as theft, but rather as “taking back what has been stolen from us.”

The massive wealth generated underscores the brutal economic imbalance. For a young person in a rural area living on a $2-a-day wage, the criminal’s promise to teach them how to make $4,000 a day is a life-changing proposition for their entire family. The only solution to this cycle, according to Warner, is economic development, as cybercrime blooms where there is high-speed internet, high education, and nonexistent employment.

For those at the top, the wealth rapidly spirals into obscene excess, transforming survival into simple greed:

GARY WARNER: “These guys are moving the kind of wealth where, uh, you have a birthday party and you all go buy Lamborghinis. Or you might give someone a $300,000 watch as a appreciation, or a Rolls Royce. These are extremely wealthy people and it’s all based on crime.”

This lavish spending is directly funded by a wide spectrum of victims who fall on an even broader spectrum of vulnerability. A victim is exploited not because they are financially weak, but because they are lonely. In the commonality of scarcity, the victim’s desperate hunger for human connection directly finances the criminal’s ascent to material excess. This devastating exchange is the true heart of global cybercrime.