According to QI the Nigerian Scam letters contain spelling mistakes deliberately because it weeds out the intelligent people and leaves people more likely to fall for it.
Can this be true? It doesn’t make sense. ISTM that they would win fewer victims that way. Some borderline mugs might spot the errors and be alerted, when they might have fallen for a correctly spelt one. I suspect the real reason is that the scammers are poorly educated.
I remember reading an article a few years ago that explained that the scam letters actually contain poor grammar and spelling in order to increase** their credibility that they were sent from a non-native English speaker. Probably the only peeople who know for sure are the scammers.
The scammers are intelligent enough to run the scams. They can use spell check and establish and maintain computer networks.
The ultimate point is not to waste time and effort on people who aren’t going to fall for a scam. If they can still scam a sufficient number of people and easily eliminate those who would never fall for the scam in the first place, it’s just an efficiency measure.
I guess another way of looking at it is that when you only need to catch 10 fish, why does it matter if there are 100000 fish in the lake or 100000000 fish? At that point, you can be selective and pick the lake with the bigger, tastier fish, even if there aren’t as many by overall count.
it seems that the emails with all their errors are actually quite sophisticated. The guy sitting in an internet cafe at midnight sending emails for pennies an hour, did not compose them; neither did his boss who may have a dozen or more ‘boys’ working under him. The emails are carefully calculated to elicit a response from the people most likely to fall for the scam.
Plus it adds an important element by letting the mark think he/she is smarter than the con man. The only way it works is if you are confident that there’s no possible way the writer of the letter can outsmart you.
While nearly all “Nigerian” letters I have received have been pretty farcical in their spelling and grammar, I just received a Skype contact request from the daughter of the late Muammar Gaddafi that had almost perfect spelling and grammar.
I’ve heard that the most common victims to these scams are doctors and lawyers (i.e. highly educated people). Whether that’s true or not, I have no idea. It sounds like an urban legend, though.
I’d read somewhere that they actually are in Nigeria because Nigerian law enforcement, for whatever reason (I don’t recall), turns a blind eye on the scammers. So when the target sends money to the scammer or even flies into Nigeria and ends up in a lot of trouble, they end up with very few options when they have no one to turn to.
Kind of similar to credit card companies working out of Delaware (tax breaks) or spammers bouncing things through Russia.
From here:
“Furthermore, the government of Nigeria has been slow to take action, leading some investigators to believe that some Nigerian government officials are involved in some of these scams”
That wiki page isn’t where I first heard it, it’s just the first place I found something to back up what I said. I don’t know if I read it somewhere or if it was in a documentary about 419 scams or what.
I’ve found a new thing to be scammers from Uganda (it’s always Uganda) using fake profiles on dating sites, such as OKCupid, posing as hot women. Funny shit, actually.
ETA: Their stories are all similar; they grew up and live in some nearby town, and they’d love to meet. However, they’re currently in Uganda, visiting their sick mother and cant afford a plane ticket home. Wont you send me money so i can come see you handsome?
In my experience, the average small-town Nigerian internet user would have English a little better than what is found in these letters. They would still make plenty of mistakes, but not quite as ridiculous as in the ltters.
I think the poor grammar and spelling mistakes are on purpose, but not in a really calculated way. People probably just noticed that putting in the effort to make them better didn’t yield better returns, but dumbing them down a bit did.
They may actually be women. The webcam-enabled internet cafes in Cameroon were basically dominated by women working long hours, probably mostly on scams, but many would probably gladly angle for a visa relationship if it came up.
I’ve taken to trying to “out” these people just by the awkward language used in their profiles; just for the shits n giggles. One time I asked this “girl” whom I knew to be a scammer if English was her second language and she said, “No! I’m good in English”.
(possible hijack)
Someone should do a thread on funniest scam emails… This is the best one I’ve got:
Subject: Do you want to see and have sex or not??
Hello, when you and I last chatting you said you wanted to see and have sex?
What was happend did I scare you off?
Sorry if I am slightly early but I am done with fellows goind round the houses.
I want having sex and a great deal of it if you are not the man for the job
just tell it please and i will search for someone else.
Authorise me on this site if you are still open for some real bang
Kiss you, Elle
…or maybe it was legitimate and I’ve missed out on some real bang?
That’s new to me. The spammy Skype contact requests I get are always Russian women with profile pictures that don’t let anyone who views them miss the “big tits”. Probably a ploy to capture straight and bi guys in their net, 'cause “hot girl”.
Too bad for them I won’t fall for it–I’m gay.
I’ve ignored every single one of them, of course, but I wonder how the scam works with people who do fall for it.
Originally I used to get letters only from Nigeria, but starting maybe about 10 years ago they started to claim to be from just about any country you could think of, not only in Africa but in also in Europe, Asia, and South America. These days many are certainly not Nigerian, since I’ve received letters in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Chinese.
French:
Spanish, oddly claiming to be from Ivory Coast (Costa de Marfil)
Portuguese
Weirdly, one in Spanish that supposedly comes from Germany.
Wont you send me money so i can come see you handsome?