If the target is old, lonely, and in need of money, they will over look the spelling errors because the scammer is not familiar with your language. It seems like there should be errors if the scammer is real. Undereducated guy with money he wants to share.
There will always be a middle man of some kind that you need to send a relatively small amount of money to, to keep the scam moving. The target does not think of the middle man as the scammer. They are usually a shipping company, or something else. Phillip Collins has to pay a bribe or fee for paper work. It is only $200 the keep the money moving, a trivial amount once you get involved. That is just the way things work in his country, so you keep paying these small amounts. Once they get the first money there will be an additonal snag in the process that needs, just a small amount more.
The middle man, or shipping company, or additional fees, is the real scam. You keep sending money and in just a few more steps you will end up with the millions. Once these targets “invest” enough money they can’t stop now, they have to keep going. That $200 dollars is a fortune in many countries.
Many millions, possibly billions are taken from people each year this way.
I knew someone who had a first class degree from Oxford (or maybe Cambridge), no mean accomplishment. He got taken in by a Nigerian scam around 1990 (this was pre-internet and all done by mail). Eventually, he browbeat his wife into signing a mortgage agreement for $150,000, all of which went down the drain. I think he went to his grave still expecting to cash in. I still cannot believe this happened.
Slightly off-topic. I bought the condo I live in several months before I sold my house. So I borrowed 400,000 from my son who had it transferred to my bank through some kind of cross-border service (but it went to my US account so no currency exchange problem). Then I got the receiving bank to certify a check for $400,000. The bank employee wanted to know what the money was for. None of her business really, but I knew she was protecting me. I explained it to her and she certified the check. (In case you are curious, I was taking it to my financial who changed it at par, no fee. He worked for a different bank. When I paid my son back, we did it all in reverse.)
I know of someone who is in a role where mistakes would cause the loss of multiple human lives (and needless to say they execute that role flawlessly, and there are tests and checks and balances in place to secure that), who got phished by a fake message supposedly from a utility company. It happened at a moment when they were physically exhausted and their mind was occupied by some other concern.
Even the smartest people have off days. Even the most sure-footed can still stumble. Of course if you’re not in those elite categories it might be more likely, but smart people make mistakes too.
Ever put your car keys in the fridge? I have. I am not an idiot. I know that’s not where they should go. If you asked me if car keys should be kept in the fridge, I would probably look at you as if you were insane, and yet, one time, I put my car keys in the fridge, because my body was at a low ebb, and my mind was full of other matters that were not the question ‘what am I doing with my car keys?’
That’s not what is happening in all these scam cases, though. You’re talking about a second-long, one-term slip of the mind, akin to accidentally driving along on your way to work as usual without thinking, even though you actually wanted to go somewhere else. These scam victims are being strung along for weeks and months, are taking out money from the bank and are sometimes being warned by other people. That’s not putting your car keys in the fridge, and I, too, have a really hard time understanding what would make an intelligent person fall for something so (seemingly) obvious.
You’re right. Different people fall for scams for different reasons. The car keys example is merely intended to illustrate how a person who considers themselves competent, can do something very incompetent, without being a contemptibly stupid person.
I deal with scams a lot in my video content and I see a lot of people saying that they can’t believe anyone would fall for this or that scam; often this disbelief is accompanied by the sentiment ‘well, they were stupid, so they deserve to be scammed’.
People get scammed by all sorts of scams for all sorts of reasons, because people have all sorts of weaknesses and scammers are trying everything to exploit them.
I heard of a case where a guy fell for, what seems to me, to be a very obvious ‘rich, dying widow’ scam. He fell for it because he had just lost his wife to cancer - and it happened to be the case that the scammer spun a story about being a widow, dying of cancer, offering her fortune to be used for charitable purposes - in his grief, he perceived the scam as a way to somehow balance out the evil that had already happened to him in the loss of a loved one - he intended to donate this supposed incoming legacy to various charities and research foundations, but of course there was no money, except the money he lost to the scammers.
Not all cases are like that, in fact I would venture to say that all cases are different. In some of those cases, people get scammed because they lack whatever it is that makes savvy people savvy, but very often that lack is no fault of their own, in the sense that nobody really chooses to have a poor education or come from a background where they don’t get to learn things that we think are obvious.
There is, I think, more charity due to someone taken in by something like this than a really obvious long con.
I was damn near fooled by one of these about 15 years ago. I was staying in a hotel near LAX. As I was up and getting ready one morning, there was a call on the hotel phone. Paul was calling from the front desk and he very apologetically said they’d taken my credit card number down wrong, would I please just give it to him? I damn near did - and then caught myself, and said I was almost ready to leave anyway and would be down to the front desk.
Of course the front desk person - whose name wasn’t Paul - was horrified.
GREAT scam idea tho. A business-oriented hotel, you figure out how to call through to the guest rooms, you just have to get one businessperson distracted enough to fall for it. But like you said, that’s phishing, not a long con relying on emotional investment and greed.
I think there’s just more charity due to scam victims in general. If someone falls for a scam because they are what people like to write off as ‘stupid’, does it really help to blame the victim? Few people get to choose the quality of their education or have absolute control over the totality of things they will learn.
A lot of that sort of victim blaming is just pseudo intellectual flexing on how smart people rate themselves to be, and how proud they are about that feeling.
I’ve had that happen a couple of times when travelling. Mind, it’s always been on the up-and-up, because the desk clerk says that they forgot to get my credit card, and could I please stop by the front desk so they could get it? In other words, no giving the credit card number over the phone.
Of course, like you, I’d tell the caller who wanted it over the phone, that I’d stop by the front desk on my way to the bar or wherever.
Due to the negligible cost of sending spam and making robocalls from Slobovia, each of us is exposed to dozens of scam solicitations per month. Or would be if we had no automated blocking of most of that stuff.
Contrast that with how we, children of the 60s & 70s, were raised about not falling for cons: don’t accept invites to games of chance or skill from strangers in bars. Don’t buy merchandise from two guys & a van parked roadside. Done: you’re 99.99% scam-proof.
Of course the situation is even more lopsided vs. the elderly who may be more trusting, more easily agitated, and not quite as mentally with it as their self-image tells them they are.
Statistically the bad guys are shooting fish in a barrel.
Yeah, for example if someone informed and vigilant was having an off day, they might click a link in an email or on a web site and install malicious software. But these scams are long term things.
My dad’s second wife fell for one of those Nigerian Price type scams, where the guy was romancing her online as part of the scam (and my dad and her were still married, ugh). She (and presumably my dad) lost thousands of dollars. You’d think she would be more savvy than that; she had worked for years as an accountant and was fairly well-educated, but she was also having mental/emotional problems as well, which I think impaired her judgement. (She and my dad divorced not long after that.)
I mean, maybe, but they’re always trying a new angle. I think the most important thing is not to pat yourself on the back too hard about how scam-proof you think you are. Pride cometh before destruction and all that.
The other thing to say is that across the whole range of online scams, it’s not actually the elderly who are the most frequently taken in; it’s the age group 18 to 35. Not usually advance fee scams for that group - more often romance scams and scams related to products or online purchases.
The older generation lose more money in total to scammers (because they typically have more savings and pensions and property to forfeit), but younger people get scammed more, at the same time as younger people (maybe not the same ones) berating the elderly for being gullible and stupid.
I believe it. I remember a few times when I got scammed in that age range, and learned my lesson. I have the fortune of not being scammed since, mostly because I am much more experienced.
This also fits my personal experience; the actual amount of money I was scammed out of in any of those cases was less than $100. Now, in those days any amount of money hurt because I was often living paycheck-to-paycheck and it might mean I couldn’t get groceries that week, and it really sucked.
Also, I sometimes get the impression all these youngsters berating the elderly, somehow imagine that they themselves are guaranteed to arrive at their old age still in possession of all their marbles.
And yet… . Maybe 20 years ago, our doorbell rang and there was a man who said he sold frozen foods door-to-door and had an excess of (whatever) and would we like to try his service. Scam, right? Well no. He was well-spoken (not that that means much) and my wife decided to give him a chance. One of the better decisions she has ever made. We have been buying meat and fish from him ever since. We place an order and he delivers a couple days later. The quality is nearly always superb. Once it wasn’t; my wife complained and he canceled the charge.
I keep getting a spam/scam? text, supposedly from the US Post Office, saying that they have a package for me with an incomplete address. Umm, spammers- how would the USPS have my phone number, but not my address?
A lot of online stores (here, at least) require a mobile phone number in the checkout process, which is passed to the delivery company in order for them to provide the customer with a delivery notification and options to change the day or leave the item in a safe place/with a neighbour, etc.
It’s actually a parcel delivery scam text message that came closest to fooling me - a couple of years back; I was expecting a parcel, but didn’t know exactly when, and I was out walking the dog when I received the text saying ‘sorry we missed you’ - it looked like it was from Hermes (which was a possible candidate courier for the item I was expecting) - and from experience, if anything goes adrift with a Hermes (now Evri) delivery, you need to act promptly or they just lose your parcel.
I followed the link in the text message and it went to (what appeared to be) a portal site for Hermes, with options to retry delivery etc; the second page said there was a small fee and asked for my payment card details - only at that point did the penny drop and I backed out without doing anything.
On more careful examination, the text message was from a spoofed number and the link went to a domain that wasn’t exactly the same as the genuine Hermes one (but it looked similar, at a glance).
I don’t think I would ever have gone through and entered all of my information into the phishing page, but I could see how people might be taken in by this - especially if, like me, the prevailing circumstances just happened to match the claim made by the scam.
I agree with your post. But what you wrote suggests you misunderstood my point. So I’ll try again.
Scammers now are trying lots and lots of different angles. All of them enabled by the low cost of prospecting for marks via computer and only using humans for the “close” on the tiny percentage that strike at their super-cheap bait. And even then the humans being used are usually workers from low-wage countries.
The sort of case-specific anti-scam training we got as kids in the 1960s that would have been 99.99% effective then against the common live in-person threats then is now woefully inadequate against the proliferation of e-delivered threats, both in raw quantity and in never-ending variety that we are all now exposed to.
As such victim blaming is misplaced; nobody is well-equipped to fend off the continuous firehose of new scams sent to them every day. The required degree of skepticism borders on paranoia: yes, they really are out to get me. And you, and everyone else. Every time you get a text, a call, or an email, or see a webpage, the first thing you need to do is evaluate it for scamminess. Every time every day. Most of us get defense fatigue after awhile. And that leads to possibly-costly mistakes.
