Isaac told Nii Kwei about the Iraq war vet scam: an American marine is stranded in Turkey/Jordan/Qatar en route back home to the US from his rotation. The authorities have seized the vet’s passport and the only way he can get out is to pay $3,000, but he has no way of getting his hands on that kind of money. Can you, the recipient of this desperate email, help? His life could be in danger if he doesn’t pay up within the next seventy-two hours. He will reimburse you as soon as he returns stateside.

There were others: romance cons, lottery scams, identity theft, credit card fraud, inheritance scams, business venture scams, Yahoo and Facebook scams—take your pick. The only thing more amazing than the amount of money one could rake in through these illegal channels was just how gullible these white people could be—especially Americans. Some of them had read and knew about these Internet cons, and yet still they allowed themselves to be duped. Amazing.

But the gold scam was the king. This brought in thousands and thousands of dollars. Arab people fall for this one a lot because they love gold. The Chinese? Forget it. They’re so good, they can scam the scammers.

The gold scam begins with the search for a suitable overseas scam target, known as the mugu, which literally means “fool.” Let’s call him “Joe.” Perhaps Joe is a gold investor or otherwise interested in gold. It’s a good idea to give Joe’s name and his picture to a fetish priest to check (by spiritual means) if Joe is a good target. The sakawa boy entices Joe to Ghana with the promise of a sale of 24kt gold from the country’s rich reserves of the magical, glittering metal. The goal is to get Joe to Ghana to make a purchase of twenty to forty kilos of gold ore. Joe’s independent testing shows the ore contains gold, but somewhere in the process, a member of the “scam team” switches the container, and what Joe pays for is, in fact, dirt with copper shavings that give the “ore” a sufficiently golden appearance. When he returns to the States, he finds he has paid upwards of $200,000 for worthless material.

Isaac had participated in more than one gold scam. In fact, in one of them, it was his job to make the notorious “switch” at a moment the mugu was distracted by someone else in the room.

“You don’t feel bad about taking people’s money like that?” Nii Kwei asked.

Isaac looked at him with a mixture of charity and pity. “You studied political science at the university, right?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t they teach you about the exploitation of Ghana and Africa by white people?”

“Of course,” Nii Kwei said. “Everyone knows about that, but most of these people you take money from didn’t directly exploit us—”

“What?” Isaac interrupted. “But they are the direct beneficiaries of exploitation through the ages, so they are just as guilty. They owe us the money, all those white people. They have stolen our gold, diamonds, timber, oil—and of course, our people. They took us away as slaves, and do you know they are still taking our nurses and doctors—”