Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are From Nigeria...

...and what about all those typos in the scam emails, and ridiculous claims about royalty needing your help to secure their money?

Sort of an interesting read and a bit long-ish. The short version is: they don't want to waste time attempting to scam smart, informed, cynical, or suspicious people... makes sense I guess.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf

Good article


This is great for a laugh Reeling in the phisher | Culture | The Guardian

It's called statistics.

No matter how silly some of these spam/phishing scams or opportunities sound or seem to most intelligent and savvy internet/computer users...as a "scamming" individual...if you send 1000's and 1000's of these e-mails everyday...statistically...some folks will be desperate enough, gullible, or plain oblivious to the dangers...that they will respond to the scam e-mail...hoping that what's in the e-mail is actually true.

Like the saying goes..."If it seems too good to be true...it probably is!"

- Nick

A lengthy read for before my coffee fully kicks in, but very interesting.

I can't disagree with the analysis on profitability and elimination of 'False Positives' but I can't fully buy into Nigerian Scammers have the unity of organization and analytical sophistication to pursue this as an intentional strategic decision.

Overall the paper strikes me as a good explanation of why this particular attack model is profitable and endures, rather than a description of the decision process behind the attack.

Yeah, seems like a long-winded and (overly) complicated way of explaining what would probably make sense as a tactic if one thought about it for a while. I honestly never really thought about it too much, other than to wonder:

"Why don't they just steal an American/English computer, run spell checker on their emails, and pay some English language educated criminal some cash to write a more well composed and genuine sounding email?"

It was interesting to read nonetheless.

A lot of Nigerian scammers - especially the smarter ones, use compatriots in London to give their scam a UK address to send items to to sound more legit, especially on ebay scams

Words like "lottery" put up red flags for spam filters. A lot of the spelling mistakes could actually be intentional since a spam filter is less likely to pick up "lottrey" as a flagged word.

Maybe they're trying to find the balance between outsmarting spam filters with misspelled words and trying to sound legitimate. Apparently there isn't one...