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
Scammers Tricks
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Re: Scammers Tricks
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...
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...
Ian Kendall Close up magician in Edinburgh and Scotland