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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

This paper is the one and only source for every claim from the past 10 years that "scammers make mistakes in scams on purpose." Crucially, no actual scammer or former scammer or even acquaintance of a former scammer has ever corroborated it. The paper itself is pure speculation.

If anything I think that paper serves best as a reminder that just because an idea is clever and logical, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.[1]

[1] As another example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

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No. The paper is about reducing a set, as far as I understand. It's not about mistakes. It's about the deliberacy of basically squeezing out the individuals who are vulnerable and who do not see the signs of being scammed.

Yes but ascribing those motivations is a guess. There's no actual scammer saying they are doing that vs. it just being a fairly unsophisticated scam. It might be the reason, but the paper provides no actual proof, and as far as I've been able to find, neither has anyone else in the decade since. Just a whole lot of people repeating the theory as fact.

I'll take your point and rabbit hole it a bit sir.

If you find actual proof - even a friend of a friend saying they once heard it from a real scammer - I'd love to see it.

I used to bait 419 scammers. Weirdly enough I actually befriended a couple of them. That was about 20 years ago. They were full on and shameless but when exposed they became more human and even sympathetic and I dropped my guard and told them what I was doing.

One of them said, and I'll never forget, "Thank you for being reasonable".

I had a friend who had a similar experience with a dating site scammer. The guy dropped the act and admitted he was operating out of Africa (I forget the country) and was not proud of what he was doing but did so out of desperation. He told my friend of his living situation, rampant poverty of his country and little to no hope of a future. That small conversation stuck with my friend.

The stuff does stick because it's literally connecting with humans who are hard done by and it's always affecting. It's really sad.

It's more sad to me that it's usually just a second layer to the scam. People's empathy can be exploited just as easily if not more so than their intellect.

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