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As patient as fishermen, the young men toil day and night, trawling for replies to the e-mails they shoot to strangers half a world away.

Most recipients hit delete, delete, delete, delete without ever opening the messages that urge them to claim the untold riches of a long-lost deceased second cousin, and the messages that offer millions of dollars to help smuggle loot stolen by a corrupt Nigerian official into a U.S. account.

But the few who actually reply make this a tempting and lucrative business for the boys of Festac, a neighborhood of Lagos at the center of the cyber-scam universe. The targets are called maghas — scammer slang from a Yoruba word meaning fool, and refers to gullible white people.

Samuel is 19, handsome, bright, well-dressed and ambitious. He has a special flair for computers. Until he quit the game last year, he was one of Festac’s best-known cyber-scam champions.

Like nearly everyone here, he is desperate to escape the run-down, teeming streets, the grimy buildings, the broken refrigerators stacked outside, the strings of wet washing. It’s the kind of place where plainclothes police prowl the streets extorting bribes, where mobs burn thieves to death for stealing a cellphone, and where some people paint “This House Is Not For Sale” in big letters on their homes, in case someone posing as the owner tries to put it on the market.

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Scammers, he said, “have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy. They say the American guy has a good life. There’s this belief that for every dollar they lose, the American government will pay them back in some way.”

What makes the scams so tempting for the targets is that they promise a tantalizing escape from the mundane disappointments of life. The scams offer fabulous riches or the love of your life, but first the magha has to send a series of escalating fees and payments. In a dating scam, for instance, the fraudsters send pictures taken from modeling websites.

“Is the girl in these pictures really you?? I just can’t get over your beauty!!!! I can’t believe my luck!!!!!!!” one hapless American wrote recently to a scammer seeking $1,200.

The scammer replied, “Would you send the money this week so I may buy a ticket?”

“Aww babe. I don’t have the money yet. I will get it, though. Don’t you worry your pretty lil head, hun,” the victim wrote back.

The real push comes when the fictional girlfriend or fiancee, who claims to be in America, goes to Nigeria for business. In a series of “mishaps,” her wallet is stolen and she is held hostage by the hotel owner until she can come up with hundreds of dollars for the bill. She needs a new airline ticket, has to bribe churlish customs officials and gets caught. Finally, she needs a hefty get-out-of-jail bribe.