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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

It could be deliberate. An unprofessional pitch shrinks the buyer pool, but by repelling scam-savvy people it *concentrates* that pool with vulnerable people, increasing the conversion rate. This is useful if the scammers need to devote a lot of individualized attention on each target.

HN had threads discussing this concept (in the context of 419 scams, I think); I don't remember how to find them. Those have enormous attrition rate between the initial contact, and the "walk into a bank and wire your life savings" step.

edit: They discussed a Microsoft researcher's article about scam emails (thanks, walrus01):

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-... ("Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?") [2012]

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=why%20nigerian%20scammers&type...

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I think you may be referring to the following:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/82814/secretly-smart-rea...

by immediately weeding out the skeptical, they can focus their direct person-hours of communication back and forth labor setting up the scam on the most vulnerable and guillible.

That's the one. The Cormac Herley / Microsoft article inspired lots of threads,

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=why%20nigerian%20scammers&type...

Applies to genuine ads too. Where there's any cost involved, it's important for ROI to disqualify non-customers at any stage of the funnel (aka avoiding false positives).

e.g. if you're paying $100 per click to attract a specific demographic, you don't want to run an ad that's so intriguing any random visitor will click on it. Not only will you be charged $100 for a dead lead, you'll also be making your ads less favourable to the algorithm, thus driving up future costs and/or making your ads less likely to appear in future.

Repelling scam savvy people with CGI renderings of monuments to previous crypto scams and a slot machine with a flashing "Scam Alert" is unusally direct.

It's almost like they've gone beyond filtering out the savvy and gone straight for the making sure nobody feels sorry for the "investors" angle

These were the exact scenes in the cartoon that made me briefly confused if this was an elaborate parody or real (the only thing that made me realize it must be real is that no one would foot the cost for such an elaborate parody video)

Never ascribe to malice, what may be explained by mere incompetence?

That's true. Though, given the situation, it'd be more "never ascribe to competent malice, what can be explained by malicious incompetence"...

Never see a pattern where there is a pattern.

(I grant everyone the right to call this law after themselves)

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