Editor 's note : The staff at CNN.com has been intrigued by the journalism of Vice , an independent media company and Web site based in Brooklyn , New York . Motherboard.tv is Vice 's site devoted to the overlap between culture and technology . The reports , which are being produced solely by Vice , reflect a very transparent approach to journalism , where viewers are taken along on every step of the reporting process . We believe this unique approach is worthy of sharing with our CNN.com readers . Brooklyn , New York ( Motherboard.tv ) -- Ghana is doing extremely well by African standards . Of course `` by African standards '' means there are dirt roads leading past the brand-new , gold-columned presidential palace , and it seems 1 percent of the country is blowing their country 's GDP at bars with $ 50 cover charges while the other 99 is selling bags of water at stop lights . They have huge mineral reserves and lots of foreign money invested in their extraction , all of which ends up concentrated in the hands of the president , his cabinet , and whichever of their cousins they 're getting along with at the time . The Ghanaian government likes to boast that their unemployment rate is in the single digits and they 're creating millions of new jobs a year specifically targeting the youth bulge , but when you pull up a pile of rubble and sit down with a member of said bulge , the story seems a lot less cheery . The actual unemployment rate for 15- to 24-year-olds hovers between 25 and 30 percent and unless you 're a relative or close friend of someone in the ruling class , you can look forward to a long and fruitful career in water sales . But Ghana also has a reasonably sophisticated technology infrastructure and has declared itself the `` Internet Capital of West Africa , '' which is kind of archly tragic because right now the internet is the only thing keeping the kids at bay . During Nigeria 's oil boom in the 70s , Ghanaians flooded into the country to take guest worker jobs . Within 10 years they 'd worn out their welcome and were deported en mass back to Ghana , but not before they 'd picked up a popular local pastime : the Nigerian `` pen pal scam . '' The way it works is you become pen pals with some dolt in America or Britain , bitch about how hard your life is in Africa , then wait for them to send you money and presents . See the rest of The Sakawa Boys at Motherboard.tv . As computers made their way into the continent , the scam was adapted to e-mail and gradually evolved into the rainbow of weird phishing messages from state treasurers and estate managers and plane-crash lawyers that crowd your inbox every morning . And as scammers got hungrier for bigger pickins , they hooked up with hacker-types from the U.S. and Europe who taught them basic credit card fraud , which they combined with the playacting of the e-mail scam to create increasingly elaborate -- and profitable -- superscams . Then for some reason they combined all of this with black magic , and that 's how Sakawa was born . In the same way that hip-hop went from a music style into a descriptor for everything from pants to dancing to potato chips , Sakawa ( which originally referred to a specific credit card scam ) now means pretty much anything involving money -- if you wear a bunch of flashy brand-name clothes you 're dressing `` Sakawa , '' if you 've got a nice car it 's a `` Sakawa '' car -- all of which makes sense considering internet scamming is the only way most Ghanaians can afford this . Right now Sakawa is in its salad days . The Sakawa Boys movie franchise has made it up to `` Sakawa Boys 8 , '' Juju priests are making a killing enchanting e-mails , Christian preachers are making a killing complaining about enchanted e-mails , and Ghanaians of all ages and interests ( but mostly `` young '' and `` not being poor '' ) are packed into internet cafes finding more and more ingenious ways of ripping off Westerners . While a lot of Sakawa practitioners have cooked up elaborate post-colonial justifications where they 're just getting the white man back for taking all their gold , a few , like our guide Seva , see Sakawa for what it really is : a massive bubble just waiting to burst . As Ghana overtakes freaking Nigeria as the e-fraud capital of the world , the government is scrambling to find a way to keep Sakawa from wrecking the country 's business reputation without cutting off an entire young generation from their sole source of steady revenue . And just to make things more interesting , Ghana just discovered oil .
Motherboard.tv goes to Ghana to learn about Sakawa , a criminal world of e-mail scammers . Ghana has sophisticated tech infrastructure and calls itself the `` Internet Capital of West Africa '' Government is scrambling to prevent Sakawa from hurting the country 's business reputation .