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Structural Readjustment: Crime, Development, and Repair in the Jamaican Lottery Scam
- Anthropological Quarterly
- George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
- Volume 91, Number 3, Summer 2018
- pp. 1029-1048
- 10.1353/anq.2018.0048
- Article
- Additional Information
ABSTRACT:
This article is an exploration of the recent phenomenon of "lottery scamming" in Jamaica. By using black market data to identify targets and presenting as call center employees, scammers subversively manipulate the development apparatuses of information communication technologies and business process outsourcing. The victimization the scam produces creates new circuits of interaction with North Americans that invert long-defined relations of capital between the United States and Jamaica, and reconfigures transnational connections of commerce and labor. The article demonstrates how scammers, through criminal manipulations of development, are able to reconcile longer histories and broader circuits of inequality through contemporary gain, producing a novel sense of postcolonial repair.