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Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#22Including typos in the spam messages falls in this same category. If seeing typos in an "official communication" triggers your alarm bells then you probably would not fall for whatever scamola it's a part of. It'd be in their interests to get you to drop off early.
Why is it in there best interest for you to drop off early? You probably won't fall for it, but there is a still a chance...
Sending out the initial spams is very automated (and so cheap), but if you respond, they probably have a human handling than (maybe with templates, but still under human control), which isn't nearly as cheap, so they want to avoid wasting time on insufficiently-gullible responders.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#23Is anyone else bothered by Figure 8, where the researcher assumes that seraches of "Nigeria" would auto-produce "Nigeria Scam"....which is not always the case, due to google personalizing seraches, (eg. if you search nigeria scams for information, you will likely autoproduce that as an auto-complete)
"Figure 8: Google search offering “Nigerian
Scam” as an auto-complete suggestions for the
string “Nigeria”.
" As per caption
Ultimatly the figure isn't a big deal.....idk, maybe i'm wrong..
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#24Including typos in the spam messages falls in this same category. If seeing typos in an "official communication" triggers your alarm bells then you probably would not fall for whatever scamola it's a part of. It'd be in their interests to get you to drop off early.
Why is it in there best interest for you to drop off early? You probably won't fall for it, but there is a still a chance...
[deleted]
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#25Including typos in the spam messages falls in this same category. If seeing typos in an "official communication" triggers your alarm bells then you probably would not fall for whatever scamola it's a part of. It'd be in their interests to get you to drop off early.
Why is it in there best interest for you to drop off early? You probably won't fall for it, but there is a still a chance...
Opportunity cost. If you can devote a few hours a day to each of, say, three gullible marks, you have a much greater chance of a payout than devoting a minute to each of 500 random marks.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#26Is anyone else bothered by Figure 8, where the researcher assumes that seraches of "Nigeria" would auto-produce "Nigeria Scam"....which is not always the case, due to google personalizing seraches, (eg. if you search nigeria scams for information, you will likely autoproduce that as an auto-complete) "Figure 8: Google search offering “Nigerian Scam” as an auto-complete suggestions for the string “Nigeria”. " As per c…
I believe tailoring search results was not as much of a factor in 2012 when the article was written.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#27Including typos in the spam messages falls in this same category. If seeing typos in an "official communication" triggers your alarm bells then you probably would not fall for whatever scamola it's a part of. It'd be in their interests to get you to drop off early.
Why is it in there best interest for you to drop off early? You probably won't fall for it, but there is a still a chance...
This is precisely the point of the linked paper. Maximizing people who are initially attracted to the scam is NOT the best strategy for scammers, because most will likely be rejected at a later point, when it's costlier to the scammers.
The best strategy for scammers is to reject everyone but the most gullible targets as early as possible. Obvious typos would be suitable for this.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it in there best interest for you to drop off early? You probably won't fall for it, but there is a still a chance...
Opportunity cost. If you can devote a few hours a day to each of, say, three gullible marks, you have a much greater chance of a payout than devoting a minute to each of 500 random marks.
Wait, what? These messages are sent en masse, and they aren't really hard to write up.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#29The previous discussion on HN [two years ago] for anyone interested:
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#30How 2 of them were caught recently by a Mumbai citizen - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Mumbaikar-bea....
Given that non-productive responses (false positives) are harmful to the scammers, one can think of spamming them with false positive responses as well, right?