They are not doing a statistical determination. There is no algorithm behind it that indicates when a country is safe to do business with. They have just switched off Nigeria. There is no appeal. There is no review.
While I very much sympathize with your viewpoint I've been peripherally involved in analyzing a bunch of e-commerce traffic and I'm sorry to report that of all the charges coming from Nigeria over a substantial period of time there was not a single one that was actually legitimate.
I'm sure there is at least one person in Nigeria that goes against the flow here and that is an honest person simply trying to get by but with the odds that bad you really can't fault the conclusion that Nigerian traffic so risky that the risks far outweigh the benefits.
Merchants typically run a very fine line between operating their business and having their accounts yanked due to 'excessive fraud', any measures they can take to protect themselves from this happening will be implemented without any remorse, it's a survival thing.
For the record, yes, we block Nigerian transactions, and several other countries besides.
No, it means that Nigeria already has a very low number of people that are going to be paying customers for online services and that those people are completely drowned out by the number of Nigerians that attempt to commit fraud.
It's sad, but it's really true.
The possible millions make use of free services they're not possible millions of e-commerce consumers.
You wish. If Nigeria had millions of legit e-commerce consumers the situation would be quite different.
There's a contradiction in terms in what you've just written.
There will never be "millions of legit e-commerce consumers" from Nigeria if the main e-commerce gateways such as PayPal continue to block the entire country.
They've already been excluded before they've started.
Are you disputing the claim that P(scam | from nigeria) >> P(scam | not from nigeria)? Keep in mind, a scam rate of even 1% would put Paypal Nigeria way into the red.
Obviously, a "which country to do business in" decision is not done by algorithm. That doesn't mean Paypal isn't using objective metrics to make that decision.
