If they’re bright enough to orchestrate these schemes, why don’t they invest some time in an English class?
Also, there was a New Yorker article about a guy who’d lost $$ to a scam, and it mentioned that one of the Africans had spelled her own name THREE different ways throughout the letters.
Carelessness? It seems to me that if I’m about to successfully scam someone out of serious $, I’d at least spell my fake name consistently.
I think it’s to give the mark a false sense of superiority. These letters often appear to be written by naive and ignorant individuals. The mark feels that he must be smarter than the writers, and so is less wary than he should be.
What makes you think spammers are clever? Whoever first came up with the idea of the 419 scam might have been “bright”, but I don’t see what’s so difficult about it once someone’s had the idea.
But do you think that is intentional? I don’t think it is carefully crafted to look ignorant; it only reflects the writer’s level of English language skills.
I’ve been to Nigeria. I think it is, at least in many cases.
I keep a collection of spam letters, out of interest to see how they have evolved over time. When one of these letters comes from someone who purports to be a lawyer or ex-oil-minister, although the phrasing may be stilted, it is usually grammatically correct and correctly spelled. On the other hand, when it purports to come from some back-country individual who has unexpectedly come into a lot of money, the grammar and spelling are much worse.
Now, there are a couple of typos, but overall that could have come from someone who is who he purports to be. In fact, when I receive authentic official letters in English from non-English speakers, they often have worse errors.
Contrast this one, which purports to come from a naive young woman:
That’s very interesting, Colibri. (Reminds me of a collection I have of mailed chain letters decades ago.)
But if someone less English-educated tried to copy the “attorney” concept letter the best they knew how, I think we would see somewhat the same results. I’m not convinced that it is intentional, especially coming from a foreign country where English is not as common.
I’m not convinced either way; I just don’t think the samples prove either theory.
I read somewhere that is it because the scammers operate in a hierarchy; lots and lots of junior/newbie (and not so familiar with English) scammers sending out the initial spams and dealing with the preliminary response and contact, handed over to a more experienced ‘boss’ scammer when and if it looks like the deal is actually going to come through. I have no cite for this though and the person who wrote the account I read could well have just made it up, but it seems plausible.
There’s an awful lot of those “attorney” type letters out there, and while they resemble each other in general outline they differ a great deal in detail. They are not just imperfect copies of one another; they clearly have been written independently by people with good, although not perfect, command of English. And English is common in Nigeria; with a lot of different languages, it is the de facto lingua franca, and a lot of people speak it. I can’t recall ever having received an “attorney” type letter with a lot of obvious misspellings or grammatical errors, certainly nothing like the “naive” letters.
And I have lots of extremely varied letters of the second sort, which almost uniformly have bad grammar and spelling, and odd turns of phrase. You would have to suppose there are two very distinct groups of scammers, one with good English skills who write the “attorney” letters, and another group that doesn’t know English well that writes the “naive” letters.
Incidentally, while the initial letters all came from Nigeria, more recent ones come from all over Africa (at least ostensibly), and some from the Middle East, the Philippines, or elsewhere.
I also have several letters in French; since I have worked in francophone Africa my e-mail is undoubtedly floating out there too. I’ll have to take a look at them to see if the same patterns prevail. I’ve also started to receive the odd letter here and there in Spanish.
In case anyone is interested, I lurk at the site 419eater.com often. The idea here is scamming the scammer. Not for money (and if they do, it’s usually donated to charity), but to keep the scammers occupied as long as possible (so that the innocent may be spared). But the real beauty of it is the absurdity and humiliation they put these scammers through. Read through a few Letters Archive to really get an idea of how these [expletive deleted] work. They are not to be pitied, they ruin the lives of many innocent, and couldn’t care less.
Here’s an example of a letter in French. It’s interesting in that it tells basically the same story as Esther Totime’s above, but it is not a straight translation. It looks to me to have the same kind of grammatical and spelling errors as the English version. However, I would be interested to hear from a native French speaker what their impression is. (While I can read French, I’m no expert.)
As an item of interest, here’s one in Spanish, claiming to be from the Ivory Coast (Costa de Marfil). This is an “attorney” type letter, and the Spanish isn’t too bad. I don’t know exactly what to make of this one. I don’t know whether it’s someone in Africa who has learned Spanish (perhaps from Equatorial Guinea, which was once a Spanish colony - when I worked in Gabon, I met a couple of guys from there and was able to communicate with them in Spanish), or someone from Latin America who is copying the scam. The latter seems to be unlikely, though, since I don’t know why they would claim to be from Ivory Coast in that case. (One of the more bizarre letters I have is from “Ramos Qropenza”, who claimed to be a Venezuelan living in Cyprus, but wrote to me in English.)
Colibri, my impressions on the French language letter you quoted is basically the same as yours. I guess what I could add is that it does look caracteristally “African”, if I may say. I’ve seen a few (legitimate) business messages written by French-speaking African people, not a lot though, so maybe others could correct me, but I usually find that the language they use is very formal and flowery. It’s not the kind of language that I would use for a business letter. In the case of this letter, the syntax is also awkward, but that is expected since it is a “naive” letter. Also, the use of capital letters, as in the heading, is something that I think Africans do a lot, especially with names. However, Ms. N’Guessan didn’t do it in this particular letter; I would have expected her to sign “Colette N’GUESSAN” or “N’GUESSAN Colette” or something like that.
I bought a few fake watches and shirts while in China. The copies are good and much work was put into them. Much less work was put into the English “labels” and things put in add authenticity, I suppose. “Swiss mades” watch, “We are making this shirt of highest quality fabric manufactures”, etc. A better job might mean a better chance of passing it off as a real thing. It would just be a matter of copying the real label word for word, much easier than making a similar fake watch. But it isn’t done.
If it isn’t (at least in part) intentional, how do you account for the correlation between good English and “attorney” type letters, and bad English and “naive” type letters? Why would people with bad English (who weren’t aware that their English was bad) almost never try to write an “attorney” letter? Why would people whose English was good limit themselves to “attorney” letters, and rarely write letters of other kinds? (Admittedly, there are sometimes a few mistakes in “attorney letters,” and I have occasionally received a non-attorney letter that was reasonably well written. But in general the correlation holds.) Having looked at a lot of these things, it seems pretty obvious to me that most “naive” letters are deliberately written badly, in order to lull the mark into a false sense of superiority.
Is it possible that there’s evolutionary pressure going on here? Attorney-type letters that are written well succeed, so they’re more likely to be reused or shared within the 419 community. A poorly-written “attorney” letter that gets almost no replies won’t be copied again. A “naive” letter doesn’t need to meet the same threshold of good English to succeed, so the baseline dialect can be worse and it can draw the same level of successful hits. A “naive” letter with exceedingly good English might even seem too good and get a lower level of success.
Just like biological features requiring lots of energy and organization, a highly-evolved organism will survive in the wild while its near miss relatives will eventually go away – but organisms can also succeed at lower levels of self-organization.
The only obstacle to this theory would be if successful letters don’t have a chance to “reproduce”, but if 419ers cooperate at all, then a successful letter would have lots of value even if shared.