Hacker News Reader

Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

lots of scams are able to continue by getting the victim to do things they wouldn't report to the police, or even to their relatives out of embarrassment

although I think it is an interesting idea that scammers intentionally make typos and absurdities, just to weed out discerning people in favor of easier victims, I think there is a larger market for meticulous more legitimate looking scams as well

this one fits somewhere in between

View on HN

> I think it is an interesting idea that scammers intentionally make typos and absurdities, just to weed out discerning people in favor of easier victims

This is an apocryphal anecdote or theory that gets passed around, but I'm not sure how true it actually is, and certainly not universally true. In that, I think scammers are way more likely to just make typos than to setup an elaborate low-level target filter. Regardless, I've also never actually seen scammers admit to this.

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

This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, taken to an extreme. A lot of theorizing about ROC curves and optimal operating point formulae, and absolutely no empirical, qualitative evidence (such as any interviews with actual scammers).

For example, there is no actual sample data provided to substantiate even the premise, let alone the conclusion of this claim:

> In choosing a wording to dissuade all but the likeliest prospects the scammer reveals a great sensitivity to false positives.

Thanks for being more eloquent about critiquing that paper than I could be. But that leaves the observation about grammar and spelling in spams and scams unexplained. How should we explain scams terrible presentation?

Occam's razor: the messages are created by the uneducated dregs of society in countries where English is not a first language, and that's the best they can do.

Although sometimes, rarely, the victim confesses their embarrassing actions as a warning to others in a well-written firsthand perspective in a national newsmagazine [0]

[0] https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w...

I doubt the veracity of that story. No real evidence, and it reads like a creative writing exercise. Did the editors even fact check it?

It’s nothing but scams all the way down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com