This scam is very old. My father described a version of it to me when I was 12.
In the early 1960s he knew a widow in Germany and she got a letter explaining about her husband's account in Nigeria. Her husband was a former oil exec and she obviously found it convincing.
The key to their scheme then was to get her to come to Nigeria where they would arrange a little drama to get her past customs so she wouldn't have to declare coming back out.
Once she was in illegally they just extorted her by threatening her with jail.
So in this case there are clear reasons
1. They'd ultimately like to get the mark on site as it were
2. Everybody thinks Nigeria is corrupt so they believe dirty money will exist there in large quantities
3. Colonial contempt for Africans traditionally makes older people of a certain attitude susceptible to the idea that they are dealing with less savvy people than themselves.
It's much older than that - it dates from the 16th century [1]. I have an original example from the late 19th C. that was sent to one of my ancestors, so I did some investigating when it came to light.
Fantastic! There's a book by Charles Stross called "Neptune's Brood" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood) where the central character is a historian specialising in these kinds of frauds. This includes futuristic versions where the 'Spanish Prisoner' is offering 'slow money' to in return for 'fast money' to help finance a new FTL drive:
> They're not poor: Here see these slow dollars signed by a bank a very long way away? Won't you hold them as collateral and front me a sum of fast money to help my friends make their repairs? We'll accept a ruinous conversion rate, just in return for the money we need to get our space drive working again; when the bank-countersigned certificates for these slow dollars reach you, you'll be rich!
I scanned it and transcribed it and shared it online a few years ago, but not sure if that is still around, and I'd have to dig through boxes in the loft to find the original, however, the letter this article [1] describes sounds almost identical in content to the one I have.
It reminded me that I also have a "letter from the prison chaplain", and a short follow-up letter from "Antonia Garcia" in shaky writing that trails off mid-sentence, and another letter from the "chaplain" saying he had passed, enclosing a supposed prison death certificate.
Apparently another scammer, using the same pen-name told his 1905 victim he'd been scammed, and that he'd be laughed at if he went to the press or authoritiees:
Interesting Q - was Spain chosen as having similar role then to Nigeria now? Lots of gold. Maybe viewed as lawless / corrupt? (Inquisition). Possibly contempt for Catholics?
Interestingly, there is even a movie called The Spanish Prisoner (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120176/) from 1997 based on this type of scam. It is good and I recommend it.
The movie plot has very little to do with the spanish prisoner scam. A good movie anyway, probably Mamet's best after Glengarry Glenn Ross and House of Games.
Its so dumb that people in todays day and age under estimate the intelligence of the Nigerian people who as a group in American are easily on of the most educated groups around with >25% of them have a graduate or professional degree.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives...)
For this same reason, ads that advertise miracle cures, tricks and dates tend to have spelling errors and terrible graphics. They do NOT want to attract any attention from people who see right through it.
That is more likely just a result of the people available to them for drawing/writing those ads, i.e. in non-English communities, rather than a willfully intended effect.
Haven't you seen all the legit Chinese/Japanese/Indian/etc. ads in their home countries with spelling errors and "terrible graphics?" It's even somewhat of a meme [1] especially some of the stuff written on their t-shirts.
Anecdata: once upon a time, I got into a conversation with the chap writing the sign outside a restaurant in Morocco, with the dishes of the day. With a smile on his face, he pointed out a spelling mistake on the sign: it was one he made deliberately, because he found (or believed) that more customers came in with the mistake than without. Less professional, more informal vibe?
My whole trip to Morocco was very enlightening. The locals were extremely sharp WRT tourists and word got around surprisingly quickly. It's foolish to leap from an economy's development level to the intelligence or education of individuals within it. Economies usually suffer for more structural reasons.
I used to work for a price comparison website in the UK. After a big redesign which took them from being a horrendous mess to "glitzy web-2.0 style" (this was 2006) their conversion rates went down.
They did some user research, and a lot of users said they trusted the site less after the redesign, because it now looked more like a typical advertising business.
I worked for a sketchy MMO site back in the day (MMOEdge), and my friend who ran the site paid $20k for a very professional and slick-looking pre-built site from a team in Australia. It looked really good, much better than the old amateur-looking site that was currently running. But when he switched to it, he found conversion rates went down, by quite a bit actually. We couldn't figure it out and eventually switched back to the old "cheap" looking site, and traffic was restored.
There's something about looking TOO professional that turns people away, I guess.
I find most "Web-2.0" websites childish and amateurish-looking. It's really a matter of taste. The Bloomberg site looks cheap to me -- just like a tabloid in the supermarket.
It looked much more trustworthy a couple of years ago.
I suspect that Craigslist would suffer the same way if they ever really changed. After all, that guy Craig whose list this is is not the same as some corporate slick entity and it makes it all look more genuine.
Maybe it's that the semi-unprofessional look implies a personal connection, like it's just "that guy Craig" like you said, vs. an impersonal and polished corporation.
This reminds me of a documentary about Costco that mentioned the company's significant efforts to "look cheap" without actually being cheap, in the negative sense of the word.
I know I am much more willing to run some software downloaded from a website that looks like it hasn't changed since the late 90s and is maintained by one person and their dog.
I never really used Digg myself, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I wonder how much is due to utility. A lot of the new user interfaces I see these days simply do not have the same utility as older ones did; there's been a clear trend in dumbing things down, called "minimalism". Just look at Gnome3; they removed all kinds of configuration options.
Reddit is a very "busy" site. But you can do a LOT on it; there's many different features packed into it. The same thing happened over on Slashdot: the old versions had more features, and their "Beta" version tried to "simplify" things which really meant removing features.
IIRC I have seen this discussed here on HN, someone had A/B tested their automated thanks-for-signing-up response mails "from the CEO" and found a significant improvemed response rate when they included one small speling mistake in the Subject.
pretty sure that mailing list email body copy with the slightly awkward formatting a CEO might use for general correspondence will tend to outperform a neat obviously-a-mailshot-created-by-marketing HTML template when it comes to generating many types of response as well.
> It's foolish to leap from an economy's development level to the intelligence or education of individuals within it.
A relative of mine is the CEO of the Fiji branch of a major multinational B2B services company.
Every few years, the regional headquarters in Australia would send over a guy from either Australia or New Zealand to manage some department. This would almost always end in disaster.
The problem was that they would always end up insulting clients. Clients were multi-million dollar corporations, but since they were usually family run businesses, their founders/CEO's often spoke poor english. I guess this is what made these (white) men assume that they were idiots and end up talking down to them. The one time it worked was when the guy they sent was Aussie, but had been raised in Papua New Guinea.
When this relative of mine became CEO, one of his first decisions was to ask HQ to send him a guy from their Sri Lanka office instead. It's been about five years now and they've had no more problems.
On the flip side of this, white expat professionals sent to work in management roles for multinational companies in Pakistan and India will frequently find that their equivalently-ranked colleagues have better spelling and grammar than they do, having studied the Queen's English in elite private schools since kindergarten. The only major difference being pronunciation.
I don't think the OP was commenting on the intelligence of the locals, but more their grasp of a foreign language. I've studied Chinese for six years and lived in Taiwan for four of them, I still make elementary mistakes because it's just not my native tongue. I bet if I was drawing up a menu I'd miss a couple characters or strokes on characters.
I've heard it is common for many Chinese people, when eating at a Chinese restaurant in another country, choosing the cheapest looking restaurant, the restaurant with the most basic signage, shops that haven't changed much since the 1970's, etc. Reason being they expected the unpretentious and basic looking restaurants to be much more authentic.
There is a Greek food place on south 1st ave in Seattle that advertises "BEST YEEROS IN TOWN!" on their sign. Yes they know what a Gyro is and how it's really spelled.
While I can't say for sure in this case, there are plenty of examples where ads are dumbed down because otherwise they don't appeal to the target market. Besides, if your target is dumb/gullible people, why take the risk of wasting a click on a smart person who you won't convert anyway?
I read an interview with a professional designer of ads on porn sites (maybe in wired?), she said they are crappy and amateurish on purpose. I'd provide a source but this is not something I will google at work.
Imagine 100 new scammers start posting whatever they want on the internet. The ones who post with perfect English get lots of people replying, but most of the victims realize it's a scam quickly. The ones who post with bad English get fewer people replying, but those who do are the most likely to fall for the scam.
You have a lovely Darwinian scenario here in which the highest return on investment comes from those with lower skill levels.
It's also the same rationale behind the rude "construction worker" catcall. Although you can tell quite a bit about a person by their gait and attire, the false positive rate is high, so it's doubtful a man will learn enough just by watching to make it worth his while to approach a stranger in the street for a sexual encounter. But whistling and making lewd remarks instantly winnows out any "difficult" (which is to say assertive, intelligent or self-respecting) women, leaving the most willing and easily pliable as the ones most likely to respond positively.
Basically the caveman version of the PUA approach. Be willing to make a boorish fool of yourself, have no shame in what you're doing and some percentage of responses will be positive.
For a long time, I wondered why all of the orgone / chemtrail / crystal worship web sites seemed like they followed a stylistic theme -- black background, spinning gifs, centered text in different colors and stlyes -- like the same schizophrenic guy made all of them. I went to dig up some citations just now, and it seems like the proliferation of cheap web page templates has fixed that, though.
That was the geocities style. Maybe the first generation of conspiracy web sites on the Internet created a cultural anchoring effect? Or maybe it just took a decade to update or replace the first generation of sites?
I had a friend who had a side-gig designing all the packaging for the products for a giant (billion dollar) dollar store. He did it because it paid extremely well, but it frustrated him so much as a designer because every time he'd do something that looked good it would get rejected - he had to intentionally make stuff look cheap and crappy!
Ha! Yes, I knew someone whose mom had very good taste (e.g., owned a small art gallery), and often traveled internationally with her husband who had many overseas posts. A large department store hired her on a freelance basis to do buying in Japan and Korea, where she'd scout products and diligently send in reports.
Some years later, she somehow found out that they were using her as a reverse buyer -- since she had upper-crust taste, her reports were used as a guide about what NOT do buy for their stores.
Kinda sad to see how vendors that should be selecting and creating good stuff are instead actually deliberately selecting & creating crap to market to us.
> Some years later, she somehow found out that they were using her as a reverse buyer -- since she had upper-crust taste, her reports were used as a guide about what NOT do buy for their stores.
419 eater is a site dedicated to exactly that. The general idea is to act totally clueless about everything. They want a scan of your passport? Request instructions on how to use a scanner and do everything wrong. Some people take this a lot further and get scammers on "safari" - a long and expensive trip where the scammer believes they'll be meeting their victim but instead just waste their time and money.
There's a couple legendary ones on there where the guys have gotten the Nigerians to ship heavy boxes over to USA/UK/Canada and cost them hundreds of dollars in postal fees
There's one where they (possibly) managed to kill the scammer. Or at least convinced him to rent a car and drive to a war-torn muslim-majority country and carry a note into a bank that said, in arabic, "mohammed rapes underage dogs". There was a This American Life about it.
That was genuinely upsetting listening to how desperate the scammer was getting. These guys, sure, steal money. But... That's cruel and unusual, for any person.
Probably. That was certainly the tone the interviewer took in that radio show. That was my first time I've seen someone do something "for the lulz" and then be confronted by a rational adult and asked to discuss the consequences of their actions.
That's why the memory of the episode stayed with me for so long- that show is from 2008.
In the same fashion as knodi123, I would laugh a real lot about John Boko if I didn't suspect that the scammer delegated the realization and the costs to a very poor relative.
This is actually a call for research from YC-funded OpenAI:
> Spam the Spammers
> Investigate the use of language models to remove the profit from spamming.
> Spammers generate a huge amount of undesirable traffic and attention. Their emails are merely annoying for most people, but a small fraction of users fall into their trap. Spammers receive responses from users extremely infrequently. Therefore, they manually reply to each email.
> The task is to build a bot that automatically replies to spam emails. Such a bot shouldn't be easy to detect, which could be achieved by use of a powerful language model.
Could be an extension from Graham's A Plan for Spam, which basically called for a DDoS on spam servers:
> As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serious pounding. The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. This isn't just amusing; it would be hard to imagine a more perfectly targeted counterattack on spammers.
> So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.
Considering that a lot of spam is sent via botnets, it would not take much for spammers to either protect themselves by hosting their pages on botnets, or use it to cause others to run a DDOS for them.
> So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.
EDIT: But note that the problem is the same if you reply to the e-mails. If this is automated and enough people do it, then sending spam with fake from addresses becomes an effective way of attacking peoples mail accounts. I've seen this happen first hand by a spammer that used incendiary content to trigger manual responses by sending out what claimed to be an ad for child porn sent in the name of an anti-spam activist. It was scarily effective, even though in this case it required getting people to take manual action (in this case bad enough that he needed police protection as a result of a range of credible threats)
Why is it a call for research? A simple n-gram model would be enough. It only needs to be almost grammatical, the spammers can't read all the messages anyways, if they want to fight that they need another machine classifier.
This is discussed in Brian Christian's The Most Human Human (a book about participating in a Turing test contest); there was a chatbot that claimed to be a young person from another country and made a lot of mistakes. People found it pretty convincing and forgave some of its linguistic comprehension errors because they had a plausible explanation for why it wouldn't be good at English.
Sounds like "Eugene Goostman". It's common to "cheat" on the Turing test by pretending to be an incomprehensible human, like "PARRY" which "simulated" a paranoid schizophrenic, about which Daniel Dennett relates this anecdote in his essay "Can Machines Think?":
"My favorite commentary on it was Joseph Weizenbaum’s; in a letter to the Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (Weizenbaum, 1974, p. 543), he said that, inspired by Colby, he has designed an even better program, which passed the same test. His also had the virtue of being a very inexpensive program, in these times of tight money. In fact you didn’t even need a computer for it. All you needed was an electric typewriter. His program modeled infant autism. And the transcripts--you type in your questions, and the thing just sits there and hums--cannot be distinguished by experts from transcripts of real conversations with infantile autistic patients."
Eugene Goostman is exactly right -- and apparently genuinely fooled people.
Thanks for the reference.
Edit: It's very interesting and Dennett anticipates a number of Christian's observations, even in the part of the paper written before Dennett was associated with the Loebner contest.
It provides hours of entertainment. The idea is to impersonate a famous person, and see how long you can string the "lads" along. I spent three months a few years ago replying as Jed Clampett, complete with an email address from "BankofBeverlyHills.com". I actually got the scammer to run an EXE I had written, to "transfer" my money into his account. It FTP'ed me the number of his account in a Honk Kong bank.
One genius, who said he was a surrounded by "rabid smurfs", got the scammer to stand in an airport, greeting a planeload of passengers arriving from Helsinki with the pre-agreed upon sign saying "Otan Poskeen", which means "I'll blow you" in Finnish.
When's the last time you laughed until you had tears in your eyes?
This was a common proposal to fight spam in the bad old days. Have clients autodownload the graphics, click on all the links, and reply. That would drive their hosting costs through the roof (100x more traffic) and shift the economics of spamming. It didn't work because doing that would confirm your email was real and would increase your spam in the short term. For scammers this might not be as big an issue
Another flaw might be if I wanted to attack nonspamminghost.com I would just need to send out spam in their name with links to their site and let antispam measurements do my dirty work for me.
Back when I ran an e-mail provider, we had this kind of thing regularly. Worst one, though, was when some spammer faked spam in the name of a guy that had previously tried to track him down, with a message advertising child porn with the anti-spam activists name and address. The guy needed police protection and his mailbox overflowed with threats.
It was a pretty stark reminder that you can rarely trust the source of an e-mail, and any counter-measure against suspected spammers needs to be weighed very carefully, because it will be used as a tool to attack adversaries.
Including anyone the spammers perceive as trying to attack them.
What's interesting is that they seem willing to engage with email "cold calls". My spam filter caught one of these on my primary email addresses once. I took the sender's email address, and replied from one of my throw-away accounts and the person on the other end picked up the conversation as-if I'd been an original recipient of his message. So a comprehensive database of sending addresses, fed into a system that produces automated replies, seems like an effective way to disrupt the entire scheme.
If you respond to someone claiming to be from Nigeria then you are probably COMPLETELY unaware of the scam(s) related to Nigeria and therefore you are an ideal target and victim. By mentioning they are from Nigeria, they quickly filter out the informed and skeptical. This reduces them wasting their time since the person responding is likely to be ignorant or naive regardless of the reason for being such (unintelligent, mentally ill, old, isolated, or desperate).
There's a element of truth to the idea that really glaringly obvious opening emails act as a filter for the most naive, but I suspect much of it is also because scammers tend to be lazy, prefer to write about places and companies they know about, copy other scammers' "formats" slavishly, aren't necessarily aware that what sounds like a perfectly regular name to them tags them as Nigerian to most readers whether they mention it or not, and are pretty sloppy in their execution even if they start out pretending to actually be Blackberry Lottery, London Mayfair. One big reason not to mention Nigeria, oil money or large inheritances in the opening email is that even really unworldly people have spam filters.
It's amazing how often even the relatively competently- executed scam listings that appear place on classified and auction sites raises red flags up because the reply email for Mrs Smith from Scotland detailing exactly how she'd like to be paid a deposit by trusted payment service PayPal belongs to princeadebayo or mrsolatunde. Still suspect they're more likely to make money doing that than the ones who have to really, really cajole the rare credulous person that replies to them to make that "deposit" for the 713,000,000 dollars of inheritance money.
Worth noting the fact that Nigerians are also associated with more non-obvious forms of online fraud is almost certainly damaging for those of Nigerian heritage who actually are trying to conduct a bit of business or sell off unwanted assets online.
I have worked in Nigeria on occasion, seeing as my employer has a presence just about anywhere hydrocarbons can conceivably be coerced from the ground.
Several of the local companies I worked with had front companies in other countries to avoid being dismissed as scammers off-hand - even by fellow Nigerian enterprises...
My local agent once lamented that "The world mistreats us Nigerians; it is such a shame that 99% bad apples give all Nigerians a bad name..." :-)
I've wondered if this creates an unintentional selection process, even if the scammers aren't aware of how it works. Like, if the linked paper is correct, then the most successful scamming strategies involving Nigerian princes etc. propagate among the Nigerian scamming community (even if they were originally created by a complete moron), while the people painstakingly crafting believable scam emails end up with worse results and either leave the scamming trade or adopt the email format of a more successful acquaintance.
In the early 1990s I got a paper letter from a Nigerian scammer. It came in an airmail envelope addressed by hand—almost completely illegibly—to my work address. (Seriously impressed by the Post Office's diligence in parsing that mess and delivering it.)
The letter was an nth generation photocopy, the text the familiar appeal. But they used to send them out on paper.
Its funny you ask that but I've watched and read a few articles of Nigerian scammers actually operating out of a country called Benin which is next door to Nigeria itself and another country (which I forget the name of). Anyways, from what I've read its basically the idea of trying not to implicate themselves and moving to a country that is known much much lesser to a scale
I heard there is this weird statistical phenomenon where as the scammer, you actually benefit from the email message being a little bit dumb. If it were actually a plausible message without typos and obvious red flags, you'd catch many more skeptical individuals in your pipeline. You spend time trying to get these people to send money, but eventually they inevitably realize it is a scam, and your time is wasted. Extremely gullible people however, won't be deterred by typos and red flags. Therefore, typos and red flags filter out skeptical individuals, enriching your pipeline.
That is exactly what the link/paper says, "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."
I reckon then that the best way to help people avoid these scammers, is to actually answer their emails, therefore making the scammer go through tons of false positives... interesting.
This may well be for the same reason as many scammers rely on the tired old 'Nigerian Prince' strategy: by self-selecting for gullible targets, they can be more efficient.
In phishing, as in scams, sending the initial batch of emails is the easy part. The hard part is coaxing information out of the target (which can require a concerted exchange of emails). That can represent a significant investment of time.
As a result, it's really important to ensure that the people you correspond with may actually give you the information that you're after. It can therefore be advantageous to send a badly-drafted email, on the basis that the people who respond to that are likely to be gullible enough to be phished.
It would be interesting to deploy a network of bots that responds to those scams, posing as gullible targets. That would then significantly increase the workload of scammers and reduce their availability to conduct scams on actual people.
People are notoriously bad at spotting bots. Just a bunch of canned messages can draw people into surprisingly lengthy conversations when they are desperate to get something out of you... The biggest problem would probably be to vary the exchanges enough to prevent them from learning to pick them out after a few exchanges.
Exact strategy of Republicans, but differing statistics. Form a polarizing ideology of economic claptrap and a combination of phony religiousty and racism. Hone polarizing features. Find it suckers about 35% of the population. Much higher hit rate than the Nigerian scam but same principle.
The 35% is a big problem. So combine it with a tax structure that favors any non-employee and high wage employees. Hope for a majority,
Ummm... because Westerners' prior beliefs about endemic corruption in Nigeria is a given, which is what the scams are usually asking you to facilitate.
Nigerian Scammers say they are from Nigeria because that's what makes then "Nigerian Scammers".
Scammers who say they are from Cameroon or Botswana are "Cameroonian Scammers" and "Botswanian Scammers", respectively and not, "Nigerian Scammers".
We might ask why Nigeria is a popular choice among scammers, as the country to which to claim a connection or origin. But that is a different question. The article seems to be trying to answer that question, but mostly fails. Yes, the point is well understood that scammers have to pitch their proposal in such a way that only the gullible will bite, who are likely to follow through. However, it doesn't answer, "why specifically Nigeria?" Because to someone of reasonable intellect, a scam letter claiming connections to Cameroon is just as "comical" as one claiming connections to Nigeria.
Let me offer a hypothesis.
The choice of Nigeria may simply be some sort of unquestioned tradition among scammers.
Perhaps it like the proverbial "onion in the varnish" (written about by our dearly beloved Paul Graham himself: http://paulgraham.com/arcll1.html).
Maybe scammers learn scamming from other scammers via some hand-me-down "Scamming HOWTO" documents, and those documents claim that using Nigeria works (so just use it and don't question it). If the scammer newbies tried Cameroon instead, they might find that it also works just as well, but they don't; they stick with the shibboleth of using the "tried and true" Nigeria.
Perhaps at some time in history, the name Nigeria did actually invoke images of financial corruption and could specifically appeal to some gullible person's sense of greed. (Just like the onion in the varnish did once help to identify temperature by how fast it caramelizes.) Today, Nigeria isn't any sort of "poster country" for corruption in the popular imagination.
Interestingly, Nigeria is even used in scams that don't have to do with financial corruption. Years ago, some woman claiming to be from Nigeria sent me links to her profile: a dating scam! Just for fun, I started to send "her" some conversations, discussing all sorts of Nigerian matters that I could google up: current events in Nigeria and such. Then the story turned that "she" is actually in Portland Oregon, but originally from Nigeria. LOL ...
Basically, scammers seem to be quite stupidly clinging to some formula involving Nigeria, which they possibly pick up from their predecessors, and are even naively applying it in irrelevant ways which have nothing to do with any connection between Nigeria and corruption.
In the early 1960s he knew a widow in Germany and she got a letter explaining about her husband's account in Nigeria. Her husband was a former oil exec and she obviously found it convincing.
The key to their scheme then was to get her to come to Nigeria where they would arrange a little drama to get her past customs so she wouldn't have to declare coming back out.
Once she was in illegally they just extorted her by threatening her with jail.
So in this case there are clear reasons
1. They'd ultimately like to get the mark on site as it were
2. Everybody thinks Nigeria is corrupt so they believe dirty money will exist there in large quantities
3. Colonial contempt for Africans traditionally makes older people of a certain attitude susceptible to the idea that they are dealing with less savvy people than themselves.