Interestingly, __all__ of the Nigerian scammer e-mails I receive are written in British English.
Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
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Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#12Interestingly, __all__ of the Nigerian scammer e-mails I receive are written in British English.
Nigeria is a former British Colony and the official language is English, so that makes sense actually.
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#13Hilarious. But it sucks that the author draws this conclusion: "If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, [...], or just Nigerians in general , then they deserve to have their money taken from them." I feel like we need a tumblr to post blatantly obvious scams like these. Maybe that would help the common folk be better at identifying them.
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Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#14While we're talking about scams, here's an interesting form which has cost several people their jobs and lost a lot of money for some UK schools.
(http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3400081/ba...)
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#15It was a great read and a nice way to give it back. Btw, after the last few chat messages I get a creaky feeling that Rebecca is a dude!
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#16You just made my day
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#17Nice job there. It is easy to forget though that we're all pretty tech savvy here on hacker news. There's a ton of people out there that would see that government logo and get all panicked and confused. Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam. Thankfully he was only out a couple of hundred bucks, but damn, we need a way to stop it.
> Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam. Please don't insult butchers. Not falling for a Nigerian scam has nothing to do with "[being] good at computers". It requires nothing more than the level-headed application of logic and reason.
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Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#18This can go badly of course, taunting crooks is never the safe policy no matter how tempting it can be. The thing is, they are crooks, so they have already decided that they are willing to break the rules, what you don't know is how many they are willing to break.
>they are willing to break the rules, what you don't know is how many they are willing to break //
Isn't this true of almost everyone in society - whether it's jaywalking, or [minor] speeding, or not declaring income, or under-age drinking, or taking a sick day, or 'borrowing' a ream of paper from the office, or ...
My point I guess is that scamming people online doesn't seem to be a gateway to violent crime or anything like that??
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#19Hilarious. But it sucks that the author draws this conclusion: "If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, [...], or just Nigerians in general , then they deserve to have their money taken from them." I feel like we need a tumblr to post blatantly obvious scams like these. Maybe that would help the common folk be better at identifying them.
Someone actually did a paper on why every one of these scams seems to come from Nigeria[1]. If you're not at least suspicious when something like this comes "from Nigeria" at this point, there's probably no helping you.
[1]http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#20Very (probably unintentionally) similar to: http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/
That was my first thought as soon as I read a few sentences. It is almost identical.