OLPCs and Nigerian Spam - Is there a link?

I own a network management company. One of our larger business lines is the Collocation Managed Services space. In this business line, my networking team manages the networks and servers that serve large clustered web sites. We have gotten very good at it over the years and are proud to call quite a few high traffic sites our clients. This makes it very easy to see trends in web site management as they occur.

Recently (early-December-ish) we have seen an amazing rise in the amount of spam coming form Nigeria. These spammers are much more than email spammers (although there are quite a few in this category clogging up our email spam filtering servers). They have more sophisticated tools like bots that create hundreds of user accounts on a site in order to spam the members; or bots that simply query large amounts of information from an eCommerce product database. All are dangerous, and all consume a large amount of our time (blocking subnets, filtering out firewall rules, et al). The one consistent fact is that they are all coming form Nigerian subnets. I think we have blocked so many Nigerian subnets that the entire country must be experiencing the equivalent of an Internet brown out. Because if WE are doing it, then so are most of the providers upstream from us.

The one event that seems to correlate with this onslaught (let me stress that there was a lot of abuse coming from Nigeria before, but not on this magnitude) is the mass release of the OLPC (much to Nigeria). [timeline] [Nigeria Article]

I have no other evidence than the correlation of the two events. However it does seem curious that an influx of cheap, easy to own and run PCs into a location already known for Internet abuse, correlates so closely to a notable increase of the same abuse. Could the OLPC project be off course? Could the rush to provide this clearly life-changing technology actually be creating a negative effect? I can only speculate. If you run a high volume web site, I invite you to email me. Please tell me if you are seeing the same thing. I would also be glad to share my information in aggregate (I cannot reveal any details about the sites we manage) to the OLPC organization. If we as systems professionals are going to do something so clearly good for all of mankind, then it makes sense that we should police and understand the impact of that generous behavior..