Monday, November 17, 2003		Newsscape

Nigerian fraud nets Singaporeans

FIVE Singaporeans have been duped out of $ 1.1 million after falling for the Internet scams offering shares in non-existent family fortunes or shady investment deals, the Commercial Affairs Department said. Four men and a woman, aged between 25 and 50, lost between $ 29,000 and $ 2,29,000. So far this year, Singapore Internet users have forwarded to the department nearly 700 e-mail messages originating primarily from Africa and promising big rewards in return for money up front. The online con artists frequently operate out of African nations, including Nigeria, Ghana, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Liberia. The "industry" is said to be the third largest in Nigeria. Some estimates say these scams earn $ 1.5 billion a year, with the money financing African drug lords.

Indian soccer on Net

An expatriate’s desire to keep in touch with Indian football from Germany prompted him to start an Internet site, which he says is now growing steadily. Arunava Chaudhuri, an expatriate Indian born and bred in Germany, launched www.indianfootball.com in 1998, which he claims gets on an average 300 to 350 hits daily. The 28-year-old told says his site got closer to 1,000 hits when East Bengal won the ASEAN Cup and when an Indian under-18 team won the Milk Cup in Northern Ireland. A self-confessed Indian football fan, Chaudhuri says his site has been recognised by the game’s world governing body, FIFA, and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) for the work it has done. It has also been the official Website of the three England tours of the Indian team in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

Confession broadcast

A woman in Germany was surprised when the intercom system she was using to monitor her sleeping baby picked up a radio conversation in which a luckless would-be thief described his bungled robbery of a nearby bar. "Instead of hearing her baby’s wails, the mother got the 46-year-old’s confession. She then informed police," authorities in the western city of Bochum said in a statement. The man had been talking about the attempted robbery to friends over a CB radio set, when the transmission was intercepted up by the baby’s intercom system. The police has arrested the man.

Plastic memory

A new memory technology promises to store more data at less cost than the expensive-to-build silicon chips used by popular consumer gadgets including digital cameras, cellphones and portable music players. The magical ingredient isn’t smaller transistor or an exotic material cooked up by the semiconductor industry. It’s plastic. Researchers at Princeton University and Hewitt-Packard Co.’s HP Labs developed the memory, technically a hybrid that contains a plastic film, a flexible foil substrate and some silicon. The findings appear in the journal Nature. Unlike flash memory found in consumer devices, the new technology can be written to only once, though it can be read many times. It acts in that respect like a non-rewriteable compact disc.