Up until now, not much was known about Black Axe - a Nigerian mafia-style gang tied to human trafficking, internet fraud and murder. In Nigeria, Black Axe is referred to as a "cult," a nod to their secret initiation rituals and the intense loyalty of their members. They are also infamous for extreme violence. Images of those who cross their path - dead bodies mutilated or showing signs of torture - regularly surface on Nigerian social media.
Dr. John Stone (in an BBC expose) now admits he took part in atrocities during his years as an "Axeman"-- his nickname was the "the butcher". Today, Stone is remorseful for his past and a vocal critic of the gang he once served. He is one of a dozen Black Axe sources who have decided to break their oaths of silence and reveal their secrets to international media for the first time.
The revelations come from the discovery of a huge cache of private communications shared among hundreds of suspected Black Axe members. The messages, which span 2009 to 2019, include communications about murder and drug smuggling. Emails detail elaborate and lucrative internet fraud. Messages plan global expansion. It was a mosaic of Black Axe criminal activity spanning four continents.
Axemen use secret forums - password-protected websites - to share photos of recent murders in internal chat groups. In one post labelled "Hit", a man lies splayed out on the floor of a small room. There are four gashes on his head. His white T-shirt is surrounded by a pool of his own blood. The imprint of a boot, stained red, marks his back.
Within Nigeria, Black Axe is fighting a war of supremacy with rival "cults" - similar criminal gangs with names like the Eiye, the Buccaneers, the Pirates and the Maphites. Messages the BBC have translated from West African Pidgin show Axemen keeping track of how many rivals they have murdered, tallying up the figures like a football score in each region. "Score is presently 15-2, the war is Benin," reads one post. "Hit in Anambra state. Score is Aye [Axemen] 4 and Buccaneers 2," reads another.
But internet fraud, not murder, is the primary source of revenue for the gang. The documents include receipts, bank transfers and thousands of emails showing Black Axe members collaborating on online scams around the world. Members share "formats" - blueprints on how to conduct scams - with each other. Options include romance scams, inheritance scams, real estate scams and business email scams, in which the perpetrators create email accounts that appear to be those of the victim's lawyers, or accountants, in order to intercept payments.
These scams are not small-scale, conducted by a lone wolf on a laptop. They are collaborative, organized and extremely lucrative operations, sometimes involving dozens of individuals working together across continents. The leaked emails reveal the case of a man in California who was targeted by a network of suspected Axemen in 2010, scamming him from Italy and Nigeria. The victim admitted he was defrauded of $3 million in total.
Black Axe's international cybercrime network is likely to be generating billions of dollars in revenue for their members. In 2017 Canadian authorities say they busted a money laundering scheme linked to the gang worth more than $5bn. Nobody knows how many similar Black Axe schemes are out there. The leaked documents show members communicating between Nigeria, the UK, Malaysia, the Gulf States, and a dozen other countries. "It's spread all over the world," the source of the data hack told us. He says he's an anti-fraud investigator in his private life and began pursuing Black Axe after encountering a number of their scam victims. "I would estimate there are upwards of 30,000 members," he says. More details can be found in the BBC expose here.
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