Bob,
Yes you correctly interpreted my point about the language in scam emails.
However ...it is NOT MY observation. I'm only messenger. This is
recognized by proffessionals who work (fight) with scam and Internet
security, and study the problem.
And it is reasonable, not preposterous.
Few remarks:
1. Scam is a business. Yes, it is a crime, but many crimes are
profitable and well organized. Like drugs.
2. This business is NOT driven by idiots. There are clever people who
cheats. Charles Ponzi, Jordan Belfort, Bernard Madoff, Zeek Rewards,
OSGold, PIPS...
3. Assumption that nigerian scam is driven by nigerian poeple is plain
wrong.
4. Every crime group is clever enough to hire some native speaker to
edit some short message without errors and dumb mistakes.
5. Nigerian scam is common name for some type of trick and does not
necessarily mean anything related to Nigeria. In Poland we have scam
mails from "US Army soldier", usually from some base in Iraq or Germany.
And there are more scam topics.
6. Most scam emails are in native language of recipient. So, in Poland
we have emails in polish, nevermind how the "US Army Soldier" learnt
this language (usually because of polish roots). And phony nigerian
minister studied in Poland, which sound reasonable, because we have many
students from Africa and Middle East (and Latin America).
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
W dniu 22.09.2020 o 01:04, Bob Bridges pisze:
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Jesse 1 Robinson
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 17:08
JR> The idea of deliberately dumbing down language in spam is preposterous.
First of all I don't understand the purported logic of it.
BB> Radoslaw's logic seemed clear to me, but when I set out to spell it out for you, I
began to wonder whether I'd mistaken it. He wrote "a method to filter out bright
people and leave only the fools", which I interpreted this way: Intelligent people
(according to Radoslaw) are less likely to produce profit for the scammer, in the long run.
If the scam is written badly, an intelligent person is more likely to throw it out, and thus
less likely to waste the scammer's time with replies that will in the end lead nowhere.
Fools, meanwhile, will not notice (or notice less) the atrocious writing, and thus be more
likely to proceed.
I'll leave it to him to say whether I read him correctly. But ~if~ that is
indeed the scammer's motive for writing badly, I think the scammer isn't
thinking very clearly.
The next part of your comment I think is just a confusion about who said what. I said
Nigerians are mostly capable of better English than I see in "Nigerian old
ministers' " emails, but that's just a side comment, not part of Radoslaw's
reasoning.
JR> More important, while English is an official language in Nigeria, it is no
one's mother tongue. It's learned, mostly in school, to whatever proficiency the
learner can achieve. The average spammer has probably never stepped inside
university. Even secondary school certification is improbable. Add to that the
'dialectical' difference between Nigerian and American English makes it unlikely
that the most fluent spammer could write something of undetectable of origin.
BB> I don't buy that last part. I have no idea how many spammers have been to University, or
secondary school, but they can't ~all~ be illiterate and therefore it's not unlikely - just the
reverse - that some of them will be able to compose a grammatically correct email. No one said
anything about "undetectable"; for verisimilitude you'd want ~some~ degree of
"foreign-ness".
---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
/* ...in your bedchamber do not curse a king, and in your sleeping rooms do not
curse a rich man, for a bird of the heavens will carry the sound, and the
winged creature will make the matter known. -Ecclesiastes 10:20 */
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Bob
Bridges
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 10:19 AM
Interesting hypothesis. I always supposed that they were badly written either
because a) scammers don't care (which is perhaps another way of saying they're
illiterate, or b) these Nigerian-oil-minister scams actually are written by
foreigners whose English is bad - not, perhaps, by actual Nigerians, whose
English is usually better than that - or c) they want to ~appear~ to be written
by Nigerians. It never occurred to me that it might be an anti-intelligence
filter.
But then, I take it as an article of faith that it's not intelligence that'll save you
from being scammed. It's not the smart people who fall for "I want you to handle my
money for me"; it's the greedy ones. And greedy people are foolish, but they're not
necessarily stupid.
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf
Of R.S.
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 10:00
3. Puzzle: why Nigerian scam emails are so horribly written? I mean a lot of
language mistakes. The answer is this is intentional. This is a method to
filter out bright people and leave only the fools. Only fool people are good
candidates to further steps of scam, which are expensive because that require
manwork.
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