Scammers Tricks

Discussions of new films, books, television shows, and media indirectly related to magic and magicians. For example, there may be a book on mnemonics or theatrical technique we should know or at least know about.
User avatar
AJM
Posts: 1530
Joined: January 17th, 2008, 12:00 pm
Location: Scotland

Scammers Tricks

Postby AJM » October 3rd, 2014, 11:30 am

An interesting piece on the BBC news website.

A wee mention for Paul Wilson included.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2014100 ... f-scammers

Andrew

Ian Kendall
Posts: 2631
Joined: January 17th, 2008, 12:00 pm
Location: Edinburgh
Contact:

Re: Scammers Tricks

Postby Ian Kendall » October 3rd, 2014, 2:57 pm

Following the link to the Spanish Prisoner description, and how it has resurfaced as the Nigerian 419 scam, there's an interesting bit at the end about the atrocious spelling in the bait letter.

A while back I read an article about this; the 419ers in Africa know that if they get a reply from the bait email, then there is about a 90% chance of getting the money. So, if they send out 1000 emails that are written well, with deceptive copy, they might get 100 replies. Since this operation is quite labour intensive in terms of writing back and forth, and keeping track of personal details, doing this 100 times is not practical for a single operator. If they write poorly, and with grammatical and spelling errors, they might get fewer than three replies, but those three have self selected themselves and are much better leads. It's a remarkable observation, and one wonders if it was discovered by accident, evolved over time or some very clever scammer did it deliberately from the start...


Return to “Alternative Media”