Two points: first, fluency in English does not correlate directly with intellectual attainment; nor does typing skill. It’s hardly necessary to compose these fraud emails in faultless English – the victim is supposed to believe that the people perpetrating the schemes are stupid, greedy, and vain, and probably those that do fall for it are imagining that those “corrupt, backwards, Africans” can’t write any better. As suggested above, the errors may be intented to promote this view. Besides, most of the scam stories are passed around, recycled, and mix’n’matched without proofreading – the Nigerian scam industry works on volume, not quality. That hardly matters, though, because…
Second, it’s not even “relatively” a sophisticated fraud. Mailing a bad check just isn’t that complicated.
You should complain you didn’t get your copy. This guy apparently spammed a whole bunch of us here this afternoon.
Here’s what he sent:
So this guy is claiming to be “the Director incharge of Auditing and accounting department Bank of Africa”. Does this letter in any way look like it was composed by a professional banker? Like I said above, I’d be shocked to get a letter this poorly written from an official at my bank.
I’m not talking about a letter being written in an excessively formal fashion. I’m talking about a letter being written poorly.
A confidence scam is based on convincing the victim that the con-man is legit. He has to sell himself and make the victim believe the lie. So if a con-man is trying to convince you he’s a banker, he’s got to sound like a genuine banker.
Am I the only person who doesn’t think a genuine Nigerian banker would write this poorly?
I’ve traveled quite a bit in Africa (including Nigeria), and while this particular letter is a bit extreme, it’s not that far off how official correspondence can sometimes sound. As has been said, even for professionals English is not their native language - and much of their correspondence is with other Nigerians who also are not native speakers. What sounds like odd phrasing to us may simply be conventions for them. They are not going to see how bad it looks to us.
On the other side, the people who fall for these kinds of scams 1) may not have great English language skills themselves (although the well-educated are certainly not immune); or 2) don’t expect people in third world countries, even professionals, to be that fluent in English.
You might not be, if your bank account was in Lagos.
How many Americans and Canadians do you know that would write this poorly? There’s a decent amount out there. Educated people are instantly going to see this as a scam, and the grammar and punctuation as ridiculous. Isn’t that what you did? What about people who aren’t that smart… and therefore probably the target of this scam?
But that’s not really relevant. Some people, perhaps those with limited education and exposure to the writings of highly educated individuals, might assume that the stiff, overwrought, and excessively formal writing style is just how “official” communications are written.
Yes, those scam emails are extremely poorly-written. But apparently, it’s good enough to hook a very small percentage of recipients, and that’s all it takes to make the scam profitable.
Nemo, the point of these scams is not to persuade you or appear credible to you. Or to most people at that. It’s just that if these people send enough emails, someone might and do take the bait. So I think your approaching this whole issue from the wrong direction. If everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone of millions and millions of receivers of these emails were as astute as you, the scammers would not continue trying it.
Fluency in written English says fuck all about ability to manage sophisticated processes. I’ve known West African businessmen with atrocious French or English, but managed to keep logistics chains moving with stunning relative efficiency.
You’re making a number of erroneous assumptions:
(i) That your standards of English mean something relative to Nigerian (it remains mostly Nigerian) culture and education
(ii) The perception of criminality.
In any case, your judgement is far off on this.
[quote=“Nametag, post:21, topic:569077”]
Two points: first, fluency in English does not correlate directly with intellectual attainment; nor does typing skill.
[quote]
Quite.
I don’t think the errors are as such intentional, but the managers of the schemes do not see any real payoff in polishing the English versus mass production (as I note you noted):
Their own language usually being Yoruba, Hausa or Igbo, not necessarily. Most write in English, of highly variable quality.
No. Why bother?
I’ve met genuine Nigerian bankers from the public sector whose writing in English was rather approximative unless effort was put into polishing.
As Colibri says, Nigerians use English extensively inter-ethnically, but it is Nigerianised.
Right, for say a low-to mid level local banker even, there is not that much call on him to write non Nigerian style (or necessarily exposure).
Someone working in state service, yes. Or low level in a private bank.
Sure the highest levels are polished, but that drops off.
That’s the only plausible explanation I’ve heard for the poor English in those emails - otherwise they’d just get someone who spoke English well to write one email and then copy it. That wouldn’t be difficult.
The scammers want the email to sound like it’s from someone who’s come into money and had no means of accessing it without your help. They have to appear vulnerable, so that the recipient will both feel sorry for the sender and think that they don’t have the nous to con them.
For the vulnerability part: If you saw someone begging and they were in a suit and speaking in a prestige accent, would you be more or less likely to drop them a quarter than the next bloke down in rags with a non-prestige accent?
For the not-gonna-con-me part: there’s a reason most car salesmen don’t speak in prestige accents.
Then you have to remember that you might be clever and worldly-wise enough to know that genuine Nigerian heirs and bankers have much better English than that (they do - I’ve known a few, and their English isn’t always perfect but it’s pretty good and they’d have someone check over important correspondence), but these email scams are not aimed at clever, worldly-wise people.
I’ve also seen at least one TV show which claimed that a lot of these scams weren’t actually from Nigeria at all, but were organised by people in countures like the Netherlands where the main beneficiaries could definitely speak English very well. Can’t find a cite for that, though.
TV shows are hard to search for; The One Show in the UK had a piece on people who were scammed, including an ordinary pensioner who, when she died, had 30,000 (no typo) letters in her house from people asking her for money, because she responded often enough to become a target for loads of them.
David Pogue has an interesting story about a particular victim of a Nigerian scam. It wasn’t Pogue who got scammed, but the person who was suppose to be buying his house for cash. Sad, but interesting story.
The scam is aimed at the clueless. They may well not know what a genuine banker sounds like, any more than they know that a scheme that sounds too good to be true, usually is.
In the One Show episode that I mentioned but can’t cite, one of the main victims had Alzheimer’s, but it takes a while to diagnose and even longer to stop the poor bastards from having control over their own finances. Alzheimer’s sufferers these days often have access to email too.
My step-nan sold my Grandad’s war medals and his first wife’s wedding and engagement rings for pennies - I mean literally pennies, an amount nobody in 2001 would have accepted, nobody in their right mind, that is. That shows to me that some vulnerable people can be conned no matter how crap the con is.
So the scammers don’t have to try hard at all; they just need to be persistent until they hit the right mark.
But still, the reason they write like illiterates is because it makes the marks easier to find.
Incidentally, because I’ve worked in Africa and my e-mail is floating around there I get every imaginable type of these letters. I’ve received letters in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Chinese. Most of them have exactly the same kind of deficiencies as the English versions.
The first Nigerian letter I received, back in the early 1990s, was a real paper letter. Back in the early days, I received them by fax as well.
It seems to me that the relative frequency of letters from bank officials or government functionaries has dropped a great deal from 10-15 years ago. Back then, almost every letter was like that. Then for a while most of them were from widows or daughters of some famous figure or general. (I’ve received a letter from the widow of Yasser Arafat, for example.) I also got letters from soldiers in Iraq who came upon a trove of Saddam’s gold. Now it’s much more frequent to receive letters from some widow or daughter of a merchant, or some poor person who has unexpectedly come into a legacy. I suspect the change is because the pose of naivete and ignorance is more credible coming from the latter.