Tuesday, August 7, 2012

About Those Dumb Nigerian Scam Emails

According to Dutch firm Ultrascan, victims of Nigerian-type email scams lost $9.3 billion in 2009, up from $6.3 billion the year before.

And WSJ explains why the scam emails sent out sound so dumb:
So why do the scammers persist in blanketing the world with outlandish propositions, announcing that they are from the very country whose name has become synonymous with online fraud?

Cormac Herley, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research who specializes in security issues, provides a convincing answer in a paper presented at a conference in Berlin and recently published on his website. In it, he analyzes the con mathematically, using an approach called signal detection theory. His crucial insight is to look at the situation not from the victim's point of view but from that of the scammers. Their challenge is to hook only people who will get sucked in deeply enough to send a significant amount of money—the "true positives." They must minimize the effort they devote to "false positives" (targets who might seem like dupes but are suspicious and/or never pay up).


It costs the scammers virtually nothing to spam the world, but it costs them a lot (especially in terms of time) to conduct all the follow-ups necessary to reel a sucker all the way in...

A proposal offering a more realistic scenario might generate more replies, but most of them wouldn't pan out. The effort of sorting through them to find the real suckers would undermine the scheme's profitability. Instead, by screaming "This is another absurd instance of the familiar Nigerian scam," the fraudsters are filtering out what to them is spam—responses from suspicious people they don't want to deal with—and "letting through" only those most likely to play along. The fewer potential victims in the world, the more precisely the scammers must target them, and thus the more absurd and easy-to-spot the attacks should be.

12 comments:

  1. I have no problem with this.

    I consider it a stupidity tax.

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  2. In other words, if you reel in the sucker with such idiocy, you know that you've got a real sucker. Thus, your success rate for those who respond is much greater (which means less total expenditure of labor on whole).

    Makes sense, and also shows that intelligence goes far deeper than the supposed objective quizzing that is used as the standard (shoot, even I do well on such tests). There are innate, situational, cultural, environmental factors and a host of other criteria that determine such things as intelligence, and these cannot be taught in any planned scheme, nor can they be measured objectively. Such is the stitch of Occam's Razor.

    Though, this is not to say that there aren't any universalities with regard to intelligence. After all, the Nigerians wouldn't continue such behavior without success, and we can certainly reason as to why they would be successful on net.

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  3. this is why everyone should respond to the nigerian scams. Make them work harder for their money. see here for some scammer-baiting: http://www.419eater.com/

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  4. Hmmmm... Now that I've learned the technique...
    Help, I'm being held in the Bahamas and they want $1,000,000 to set me free. If 100,000 of you just send $10 to:
    Kidnappers
    Abaco, Bahamas
    They'll let me go. Then my fabulously wealthy patents will pay you back $100 each!!

    Or... My government health plan will give you better health coverage AND save you money!!!

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  5. God. There are some really fucking stupid morons out there. I'm talking dumber than my dumbass late dog.

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    Replies
    1. I declare this the "Funniest Comment of the Day."

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  6. My own father was one of those "most likely to play along" types. He ended up wiring $100,000 to Ghana 2 years ago...it's still a sore subject at the dinner table - to put it lightly. It really is bizarre when I try to talk to him about it. Here is a guy who made a good living for much of his life working hard for a Fortune 500 company. Yet the promise of something for nothing had him sneaking behind my mother's back to send a small fortune to African strangers...expensive way to learn about phishing.

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    1. lol. your father must really feel like a numbskull. he can never live it down for the rest of his life!

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  7. A friend in the police field told me the Nigerian government is in on the scam.

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    1. A friend in the CIA told me the U.S. government is the scam...

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    2. At $9.3B it's probably a major component in Nigeria's GDP. Of course, they will be on the scam.

      Now, as much as I like to think of it as stupidity tax, the people they prey on are typically old and have age-related mental problems. Alzheimer's is cruel.

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    3. Right, and the world-wide trade in French Fries is a major part of France's GDP.

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