Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? [pdf]

microsoft.com

35 pointsjaredwiener18 comments

The answer from the paper:

"By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor."

Basically the scammer needs to reduce false positives (email recipients who are unlikely to become victims) and adding some outlandish detail ensures that only the real fools will be fooled.

Reminds me of a school class mate who had a very low success rate with girls, and switched successfully to better odds by a similar strategy: "If you talk about you, and your life, and where you come from for ten minutes, and she is still there listening, then you know you have a chance."

> Reminds me of a school class mate who had a very low success rate with girls, and switched successfully to better odds by a similar strategy: "If you talk about you, and your life, and where you come from for ten minutes, and she is still there listening, then you know you have a chance."

Reminds me how I found my current piano teacher. I'd bang incessantly on the white keys with the pedal fully depressed for a full ten minutes. If the teacher hadn't thrown me out by that point, I knew I'd found a good one.

Now that she's got me on energy drinks and ear plugs and I can go a full four hours without stopping. We think that should be enough music to start getting some paying gigs at restaurants. So I'm using the same 10 minute white-key bang session for my auditions to filter out the good restaurants, but unfortunately I haven't found any yet.

Still, my teacher says to keep my head up and my ear plugs in. As long as I continue with the lessons the gigs are sure to come.

All in all it's an incredibly satisfying and productive relationship!

Persistence is the key

Persistence on the keys

That is an impressively terrible relationship technique, but I suppose the repulsion strategy works when someone's goal is to con only the most vulnerable of victims.

> Basically the scammer needs to reduce false positives (email recipients who are unlikely to become victims) and adding some outlandish detail ensures that only the real fools will be fooled.

And then you get people like James Veitch, "This is what happens when you reply to spam email":

* https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_...

> Veitch recorded three TED talks in 2015 and 2016.[17] One chronicles Veitch's encounter with a supermarket chain's marketing emails, and the other two are about scam emails.[18][19][20]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Veitch_(comedian)

This type of scam has a bit of history:

> The modern scam is similar to the Spanish Prisoner scam that dates back to the late 18th century.[14][15] In that con, businessmen were contacted by an individual allegedly trying to smuggle someone who is connected to a wealthy family out of a prison in Spain. In exchange for assistance, the scammer promised to share money with the victim in exchange for a small amount of money to bribe prison guards.[16]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam#History

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner

The basic formula has remained like that for centuries and still finds its marks today:

https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/billionaire-pleads-gu...

At one point Spain was considered exotic enough to fool marks. I wonder where the next exotic place will be?

"Please help me. I am a billionaire whose experimental neuralink implants have malfunctioned and my consciousness is currently trapped on a rapidly decaying StarLink satellite. Yours is the only email I could find in the database. Please send $1000 so my Tesla robot can perform the surgery needed to restore my consciousness. In exchange I can offer you unlimited rides on the Hyperloop network (weekends only)."

I'm pretty sure the Loans Affair in Australia, 1974, was an advanced fee scam. At least in part. It led to the ending of a government in one of the most tumultuous periods in Australian history.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loans_affair

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...

I think this is the paper that originated this theory that Nigerian scammers set out a deliberately bad "offer" in order to increase their signal to noise ratio. I believe a lot of people have cited this paper as evidence that this is happening.

It seems plausible, but the paper doesn't present any evidence that this is what the scammers were actually doing; it's just a mathematical analysis that such a strategy would be useful.

It also seems conceivable that this paper has become so well known that scammers are now using it as a guide to what strategy to adopt.

It is possible that the technique was not deliberately designed, but it evolved as a particularly successful result in scamming that was then replicated.

Maybe the scammers thought "I have tried 50 different mails, and this is the one that got me incredible results"; so this was the one that was popularized, even if the people doing it didn't understand why it worked better than the others.

In honor of the 10th anniversary discovery of the lost Nigerian Doctor Who episodes, I'm going to assert that the whole thing is a nefarious plot by The Master to suppress them:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/11/doctor-...

At some point, someone probably sent an email explaining that a Nigerian television station had found a priceless box of lost episodes, and then requested assistance with preservation and/or shipping.

This is really interesting - reminds me of Matt Levine's observation about some of the crypto scams promising outrageous returns that do it for the same reason, which is to filter out the most gullible targets out of the set.

To winnow out the most gullible and socially disconnected marks, people like my grandmother, who has been taken by two of these.

Interesting conclusion here is that the best way to put scammers out of business is to actually reply to those spam emails, engage in the conversation with them, the longer the better.

I wonder if Google could add a Bard chatbot to Gmail for this specific purpose :)

EDIT: on second thought, what if scammers themselves can use AI to manage all communications with potential victims? Will spam turn into AI war? each side trying to determine if they are talking to a real person or to a bot?

There is a lot of content on YouTube of people scambaiting, it's quite fun to watch. I haven't seen one with someone using an LLM to chat with the scammers, but it could well be there somewhere

Because the scammers want to select the most ignorant and prejudiced people they can find, they want dumb people who will never think twice, because they think they are absurdly superior to what they think are dumb and utterly corrupt Africans, and thus, could never be scammed.

That was a very long way to say "to filter down to the most gullible folks".

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