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Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
61–70 of 79 posts
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't remember what the website is exactly and I am currently at work now so I won't be able to google it up but there was a person that use to do this except that he didn't use a bot but "bait" the scammers himself. It is utterly hilarious. What he does is he replies to a "scam email" and most of the scammers will do anything once they see an actual human being replying to their spam email. He obviously leads them…
I use to think it was funny messing with people from poor countries who participated in activities that wasted our time for little $ benefit to themselves but not so much any more. Humiliating other humans beings for enjoyment isn't a great trait to encourage. These sites are also, whether that say they 'aren't' or not, are racist on some level. I'm sure there are some real a@#holes participating and running these sc…
> I'm sure there are some real a@#holes participating and running these scams
I'd say that all of them are arseholes. The ones running the scams are not the local poor - they are poor relative to us in the west, but not in local economy they are relatively powerful. They are the local criminal hot-shots.
>but often the people on the ground are just human beings who have no other way to earn money
This is the problem. The above people use the poor(er) in their area as cannon fodder. When a 419eater story shows someone in a massively embarrassing situation that is not the scammer, it is some local fool that the scammer has somehow scammed (or forced) into playing the game. Yes they have wasted the scammer's time, but that is not the scammer being humiliated in those pictures.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#63One thing I have been wanting to do for a long time about Nigerian like scams, but never got around doing it, was the following: 1. create some bait email accounts from gmail, yahoo, and so on, and expose them somewhere on internet so they get harvested by scammers. 2. write a dumb program that is able to do some primitive parsing of the emails from the scammers, and reply to them. For example, let's say the email fr…
Sounds like a good use-case for mechanical turk.
I think it's better if nobody benefits from there being scammers. Otherwise those under pay via mehanical turk may be tempted to pose as (or become) scammers themselves
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#64As a point of interest: Nigerian scam letters predate the internet. In the eighties and nineties, colleagues in the oil and gas industry, and I, received frequent postal letters, postmarked Nigeria. One memorable one I received from a high official in the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, requested I keep his proposal a secret so "that my image may not be dented." We assumed they combed the Oil and Gas Directory,…
>these original, truly Nigerian scams, were less sophisticated than the later Internet imitators, since targeting technical professionals isn't targeting the dumbest of the dumb.
On the contrary, the scam you describe look much more elaborated than current ones since they got your real peraonal info. Besides technical professionals seem like a great target for scams, since they likely have more money than the average and they are probably not as hard to scam as you might think, given that even a harvard professor fell victim to a 419er http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/31/harvard_prof_scams/
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't remember what the website is exactly and I am currently at work now so I won't be able to google it up but there was a person that use to do this except that he didn't use a bot but "bait" the scammers himself. It is utterly hilarious. What he does is he replies to a "scam email" and most of the scammers will do anything once they see an actual human being replying to their spam email. He obviously leads them…
I use to think it was funny messing with people from poor countries who participated in activities that wasted our time for little $ benefit to themselves but not so much any more. Humiliating other humans beings for enjoyment isn't a great trait to encourage. These sites are also, whether that say they 'aren't' or not, are racist on some level. I'm sure there are some real a@#holes participating and running these sc…
These sites are also, whether that say they 'aren't' or not, are racist on some level.
I'm sure there are some real a@#holes participating and running these scams but often the people on the ground are just human beings who have no other way to earn money.
I would actually consider it racist to assume that people from a certain country are incapable of telling right from wrong in earning a livelihood. India, for example, has (surprisingly) a far smaller GDP per capita than Nigeria, and despite India having a reputation for being an IT hub, one seldom hears about online scams being perpetrated by Indians. The same goes for many other poor countries whose citizens don't resort to online scamming.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't remember what the website is exactly and I am currently at work now so I won't be able to google it up but there was a person that use to do this except that he didn't use a bot but "bait" the scammers himself. It is utterly hilarious. What he does is he replies to a "scam email" and most of the scammers will do anything once they see an actual human being replying to their spam email. He obviously leads them…
If you automated it though, and scaled it enough, you could effectively spam the scammers, reducing their profitability.
Yes it could be a feature of the spam detector.
However it could lead to an arms race. What if the scammers start to write bots that parse the answers until there is a substantial progress in the scam? We would end up with machine small talk and the overall level of spam traffic would skyrocket…
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The complexity/frequency ratio (As in, complexity of the bot over frequency of spam) seems a little low to spend time writing something like this. A manual solution would probably be better.
Not really, the goal is to have lots of emails responding to the scammers, so they don't know who to pay attention to, so that's hard to have a manual process for that (and there's already 419eaters).
As I commented elsewhere in the topic, this runs the risk that the scammers themselves start to use bots to parse and analyze the responses, yielding to a net increase in spam traffic, although no human would read the messages.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#68That's why I always answer them as soon as I have some time. Lot of fun.
And now I realize, it's been a few months since I didn't get one of those mails.
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use to think it was funny messing with people from poor countries who participated in activities that wasted our time for little $ benefit to themselves but not so much any more. Humiliating other humans beings for enjoyment isn't a great trait to encourage. These sites are also, whether that say they 'aren't' or not, are racist on some level. I'm sure there are some real a@#holes participating and running these sc…
These sites are also, whether that say they 'aren't' or not, are racist on some level. I'm sure there are some real a@#holes participating and running these scams but often the people on the ground are just human beings who have no other way to earn money. I would actually consider it racist to assume that people from a certain country are incapable of telling right from wrong in earning a livelihood. India, for exam…
you haven't had had any of those calls from "Microsoft" saying you have a virus then?
Re: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)
#70Now that's what they call product market fit.