Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't marketers try the exact opposite approach?

In this paper about "Nigerian" mail fraud http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf

researchers argue that it's very efficient for attackers to appear fraudulent, because this helps select the most gullible victims (true positives) while weeding out "false positives": people who respond at first, but are not scammed in the end.

From the abstract:

> "Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. 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."

Shouldn't marketers do the same? Isn't it more efficient to eliminate non-targets as early as possible, instead of dragging into the process people who will ultimately relent. If so, it would seem preferable to send junk mail that is very explicitly junky.

Maybe it's because they have different goals?

The Nigerian-mail-fraud-scammer needs to get the gullible person to respond. If that's 1 out of 100,000 people, they need to do what they can just to get that 1 to respond. If 100 out of 100,000 respond, they have to sift through the "noise" of not-so-gullible people to find the true gullible one.

In this case, they just want to get you to open the letter and read the sales pitch (the goal isn't to find gullible people).

That site was posted on here before, to which someone quite reasonably offered the alternate hypothesis "what if the scammers sending those particular emails are on average really stupid, as attested by anyone who has ever attempted to interact with them"

If you're sending out direct mail marketing and yet have an ordering process so cumbersome (or service of such dubious legality) that regular folks contemplating buying your product are a problem, your company isn't going to be around for very long.

Very explicitly junky mail works because the target demographic actually do get excited by the additional free services worth $100!!!! and nobody else would care to respond to the mail anyway

It's unlikely that mortgage companies are deluged with bad leads because people thought the handwriting was legit. Weeding out false positives is only an issue if you have a false positive problem.

Why do you need handwriting if not to make people open the mail, who would have otherwise thrown it away?

And if they'd have thrown it away, how likely is it they'll change their mind after having been tricked into opening it because it appeared to have been sent by a human?

The point of junk mail is not to be read, it's to generate valuable/actionable leads; I don't see how handwriting helps -- maybe it does, but we would need to see ultimate conversion rates (not just rates of initial inquiries for example).

The point is to get people to open the letter, yes. Having people open the letter who won't actually respond has zero cost to the advertiser. The letter itself is a sunk cost, so trying to push people away from opening it is not beneficial. By trying to entice them to read, in the worst case, they just throw away your letter a little bit later. More people opening the letter is not a negative like being deluged with thousands of false leads would be for the Nigerian scammer.

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