Sakawa – arketyp.

In Sakawa (a Ghanaian term for internet fraud schemes) we meet three Ghanaian youngsters who, out of desperation, turn to scamming people online with the help of black magic.

The film opens with a scene in which the camera zooms out from a dating site on a laptop screen to reveal a room with about a dozen young black men on their computers, bare walls with a couple of TV sets and a tattered Real Madrid flag. Here we meet the first of our protagonists, OneDollar, one of many youngsters in the country who live off scamming Westerners. His goal is to earn at least $40,000 from the practice and move to Italy to start up his own farm.

On a personal level, it is easy to understand why people in such a poor and exploited country resort to “sakawa”. Young single mother Ama can barely make a living out of selling fruit at the market, so she asks Francis, an experienced scammer, to teach her how to “work the clients”.

The members of this community of fraudsters exchange experiences throughout the film, which provides some of the most amusing moments. While “the UK and Belgium are not working”, and “Canadians are full of deceit”, a Finnish client keeps asking one of the protagonists “to show him her pussy”, which leads the scammer to the conclusion that “the whites are so disgusting nowadays”.