Courtesy of a link provided by commenter William Ockham at The Passive Voice, I found a scholarly, rather technical and mathematical, but very interesting article titled 'Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?' (link is to an Adobe Acrobat document in .PDF format). It's from Microsoft Research, and analyzes how scammers operate and how they try to pick only the most gullible respondents.
The Abstract sums it up as follows:
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 overriding 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.
There's more at the link. Not casual or light reading, but interesting to those involved with computer security, or who want to understand how scammers make a living.
Peter
2 comments:
The 419 scams hurt many people that are lonely or just easily taken in.
Thankfully there are good folks out there fighting the scammers and having some fun doing so.
On occasion I visit this forum to catch up on the scam artist's getting what they deserve.
The following link may have you laughing at the trials and tribulations that these good people put the bad guys through.
http://www.419eater.com/
Here is the link to the dating scam page which is always good for a few chuckles.
http://forum.419eater.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=44&sid=c2de25bf9ce0ed3571b92551e85cab5e
Very interesting indeed, although I'm not sure I'd agree with the author's casual dismissal of the geographic problem. There's a huge resource gap between "has access to the Internet for email" and "can freely travel to and from Sweden to collect from Western Union".
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