Someone calls and says, “Grandma, i’ve been in an accident …” and so on. Why don’t people ask a few questions? If you’re my grand daughter, what’s my name, when is my birthday, where do I live, what’s my favorite food?

    • lime@feddit.nl
      1·
      4 hours ago

      Here is one article which makes a similar point, and another which discuss the strategies of scammers and profiles of people likely to fall for scams. (I made the original comment and am not the lime who responded to your citation request). I will address your other comments on the topic here.

      I can also offer my anecdotal observations about Nigerian scams from time I spent scambaiting when I was younger, back when I thought I was doing a service by distracting scammers’ focus away from someone vulnerable, and because it was amusing to see what stories they’d come up with.

      • You were correct in saying that the opening messages would be copy-pasted stories with details changed.
      • The stories had flaws and inconsistencies, lacked detail.
      • Confronting the scammers immediately or refusing to switch to their platform of choice usually caused them to disconnect immediately. The excuses would come later when they were invested in a longer conversation and didn’t want to lose a potential victim.
      • The general theme was that they are from a country other than Nigeria, or military sent overseas, stuck in a bad situation and need help. If I pretended to be male, there could be a romance angle.
      • Sometimes they would admit where they are really from (confirmed with an IP grabber) but change their story and try to get sympathy by claiming scamming was the only way they could earn enough to survive.
      • Gift cards were the initial payment method requested most of the time.

      The long, elaborate (often romance and crypto-themed) scams you are thinking of are likely pig-butchering scams originating from China. Perhaps Nigerian scammers have evolved their strategies since then too; it has been years since I bothered to engage with them at all.

      So no, I was not perpetuating a meme about scammers “preselecting stupid people”, nor did I say that everyone who falls for scams is stupid. Many are lonely, elderly, unfamiliar with technology, desperate, or kind-hearted but naive.

    • lime!@feddit.nu
      24·
      12 hours ago

      here’s one. it’s a paper from microsoft research researching why so many scammers say they are from nigeria, but the same premise applies:

      Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. 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.

      • lime@feddit.nl
        1·
        4 hours ago

        Thanks for providing a source!

        I just noticed that we have nearly identical usernames, down to the instance 😯 I had to do a double-take when I saw the comment thread. It was not my intention to imitate you. I am simply not creative when it comes to choosing usernames.

      • lemmylommy@lemmy.world
        5·
        10 hours ago

        That was an interesting read - and indeed a citation. Thank you.

        However, there are one serious and one minor flaw in their arguments:

        That the collection point for the money is constrained to be in Nigeria doesn’t seem a plausible reason either. If the scam goes well, and the user is willing to send money, a collection point outside of Nigeria is surely not a problem if the amount is large enough.

        That is simply an unproven assumption, and a wrong one at that. And it leads me to doubt the depth of that persons knowledge of Nigerian scams.

        While scammers from Nigeria do have methods to collect money that victims have sent to another country (through accomplices or unwitting mules), those come with additional costs and risks. And that is usually not worth it in the initial stages of the scam, when the amount is not „large enough“, usually a few hundred, maybe thousand dollars. Only when the victim is „committed“ by sending a small amount do they usually increase their demands, and then it is of course worth it to produce eg a bank account or even offer a meeting in the west.

        As a side note: there has been a bit of a shift in Nigerian scamming over the last few years. Scammers seem to move from the „traditional“ advance fee fraud over to romance scamming, which they often do under a „western“ false identity, and for which they prefer gift cards and bitcoin as payment. It would be interesting to see if that is more than correlation.

        Only when potential victims respond does the labor-intensive and costly effort of following up by email (and sometimes phone) begin.

        While this is not entirely false, it is inaccurate. Scammers usually have at least the first few emails prepared, so the first few replies (in which they explain a bit more) are nothing more than copy and paste - not exactly „costly effort“. Quite often those first emails also include small tasks for the victim, like sending their passport scan, filling in forms or actively contacting someone else by email, which is an actual filter.

        So you see, it’s a bit more complex than that meme „they are preselecting stupid people“.

        • lime!@feddit.nu
          3·
          10 hours ago

          interesting conclusion, maybe you should publish? you seem to have more info than they did ten years ago.