
Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012) - mathattack
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/publication.aspx?id=167719
======
scandox
This scam is very old. My father described a version of it to me when I was
12.

In the early 1960s he knew a widow in Germany and she got a letter explaining
about her husband's account in Nigeria. Her husband was a former oil exec and
she obviously found it convincing.

The key to their scheme then was to get her to come to Nigeria where they
would arrange a little drama to get her past customs so she wouldn't have to
declare coming back out.

Once she was in illegally they just extorted her by threatening her with jail.

So in this case there are clear reasons

1\. They'd ultimately like to get the mark on site as it were

2\. Everybody thinks Nigeria is corrupt so they believe dirty money will exist
there in large quantities

3\. Colonial contempt for Africans traditionally makes older people of a
certain attitude susceptible to the idea that they are dealing with less savvy
people than themselves.

~~~
scoot
It's much older than that - it dates from the 16th century [1]. I have an
original example from the late 19th C. that was sent to one of my ancestors,
so I did some investigating when it came to light.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner)

~~~
chimeracoder
> I have an original example from the late 19th C. that was sent to one of my
> ancestors, so I did some investigating when it came to light.

Wow, I'd be fascinated to see that.

~~~
scoot
I scanned it and transcribed it and shared it online a few years ago, but not
sure if that is still around, and I'd have to dig through boxes in the loft to
find the original, however, the letter this article [1] describes sounds
almost identical in content to the one I have.

It reminded me that I also have a "letter from the prison chaplain", and a
short follow-up letter from "Antonia Garcia" in shaky writing that trails off
mid-sentence, and another letter from the "chaplain" saying he had passed,
enclosing a supposed prison death certificate.

[1] [http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/proto-spam-spanish-
pri...](http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/proto-spam-spanish-prisoners-
and-confidence-games)

EDIT: I found the transcript and have put a copy online here:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dsb_Ss9dIRa8NvoAZ0W2FLi0...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dsb_Ss9dIRa8NvoAZ0W2FLi0cxcH_2bL127DNcYOmOM/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
scoot
Apparently another scammer, using the same pen-name told his 1905 victim he'd
been scammed, and that he'd be laughed at if he went to the press or
authoritiees:

[http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=9D07E5D811...](http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=9D07E5D8113BE631A25754C2A9609C946497D6CF)

------
serg_chernata
For this same reason, ads that advertise miracle cures, tricks and dates tend
to have spelling errors and terrible graphics. They do NOT want to attract any
attention from people who see right through it.

~~~
Razengan
That is more likely just a result of the people available to them for
drawing/writing those ads, i.e. in non-English communities, rather than a
willfully intended effect.

Haven't you seen all the legit Chinese/Japanese/Indian/etc. ads in their home
countries with spelling errors and "terrible graphics?" It's even somewhat of
a meme [1] especially some of the stuff written on their t-shirts.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/engrish](https://www.reddit.com/r/engrish)

~~~
barrkel
Anecdata: once upon a time, I got into a conversation with the chap writing
the sign outside a restaurant in Morocco, with the dishes of the day. With a
smile on his face, he pointed out a spelling mistake on the sign: it was one
he made deliberately, because he found (or believed) that more customers came
in with the mistake than without. Less professional, more informal vibe?

My whole trip to Morocco was very enlightening. The locals were extremely
sharp WRT tourists and word got around surprisingly quickly. It's foolish to
leap from an economy's development level to the intelligence or education of
individuals within it. Economies usually suffer for more structural reasons.

~~~
blowski
I used to work for a price comparison website in the UK. After a big redesign
which took them from being a horrendous mess to "glitzy web-2.0 style" (this
was 2006) their conversion rates went down.

They did some user research, and a lot of users said they trusted the site
less after the redesign, because it now looked more like a typical advertising
business.

~~~
vocatus_gate
I worked for a sketchy MMO site back in the day (MMOEdge), and my friend who
ran the site paid $20k for a very professional and slick-looking pre-built
site from a team in Australia. It looked really good, much better than the old
amateur-looking site that was currently running. But when he switched to it,
he found conversion rates went down, by quite a bit actually. We couldn't
figure it out and eventually switched back to the old "cheap" looking site,
and traffic was restored.

There's something about looking TOO professional that turns people away, I
guess.

~~~
099182919
I find most "Web-2.0" websites childish and amateurish-looking. It's really a
matter of taste. The Bloomberg site looks cheap to me -- just like a tabloid
in the supermarket.

It looked much more trustworthy a couple of years ago.

~~~
fludlight
I felt the same way 10-15 years ago when the WSJ print edition started using
color on the front page.

------
mrspeaker
I had a friend who had a side-gig designing all the packaging for the products
for a giant (billion dollar) dollar store. He did it because it paid extremely
well, but it frustrated him so much as a designer because every time he'd do
something that looked good it would get rejected - he had to intentionally
make stuff look cheap and crappy!

~~~
toss1
Ha! Yes, I knew someone whose mom had very good taste (e.g., owned a small art
gallery), and often traveled internationally with her husband who had many
overseas posts. A large department store hired her on a freelance basis to do
buying in Japan and Korea, where she'd scout products and diligently send in
reports.

Some years later, she somehow found out that they were using her as a reverse
buyer -- since she had upper-crust taste, her reports were used as a guide
about what NOT do buy for their stores.

Kinda sad to see how vendors that should be selecting and creating good stuff
are instead actually deliberately selecting & creating crap to market to us.

~~~
erichocean
> _Some years later, she somehow found out that they were using her as a
> reverse buyer -- since she had upper-crust taste, her reports were used as a
> guide about what NOT do buy for their stores._

That's genius.

------
kentosi
For anyone else getting "Site maintenance in progress" here is Google's cached
version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:toQgd2k...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:toQgd2kX89oJ:research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/%3Fid%3D167719+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
projectramo
So the best thing we can do to prevent scammers is to respond to their scams,
engage them for long periods and use up their attention and time?

It will only require a little time from each of us, but it will add up to a
lot of time for the scammers.

~~~
tyre
This is a perfect use case for the current state of "AI" messengers. Auto-
reply to spam emails and drag out conversations.

Free app idea for those wanting to start a small machine-learning project.

~~~
Inlinked
This is actually a call for research from YC-funded OpenAI:

> Spam the Spammers

> Investigate the use of language models to remove the profit from spamming.

> Spammers generate a huge amount of undesirable traffic and attention. Their
> emails are merely annoying for most people, but a small fraction of users
> fall into their trap. Spammers receive responses from users extremely
> infrequently. Therefore, they manually reply to each email.

> The task is to build a bot that automatically replies to spam emails. Such a
> bot shouldn't be easy to detect, which could be achieved by use of a
> powerful language model.

[https://openai.com/requests-for-research/#spam-
spammers](https://openai.com/requests-for-research/#spam-spammers)

Could be an extension from Graham's A Plan for Spam, which basically called
for a DDoS on spam servers:

> As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam
> would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in
> order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serious pounding.
> The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. This isn't just
> amusing; it would be hard to imagine a more perfectly targeted counterattack
> on spammers.

> So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam
> filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a
> suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html)

~~~
vidarh
Considering that a lot of spam is sent via botnets, it would not take much for
spammers to either protect themselves by hosting their pages on botnets, or
use it to cause others to run a DDOS for them.

~~~
tormeh
This is a DDOS of the humans, not their computers.

~~~
vidarh
I was responding to the Paul Graham quote:

> So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam
> filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a
> suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.

EDIT: But note that the problem is the same if you reply to the e-mails. If
this is automated and enough people do it, then sending spam with fake from
addresses becomes an effective way of attacking peoples mail accounts. I've
seen this happen first hand by a spammer that used incendiary content to
trigger manual responses by sending out what claimed to be an ad for child
porn sent in the name of an anti-spam activist. It was scarily effective, even
though in this case it required getting people to take manual action (in this
case bad enough that he needed police protection as a result of a range of
credible threats)

------
leonardinius
Previous HN discussions (I omitted one without comments)

    
    
      - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8224059
      - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6673003
    

Source
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Why%20Do%20Nigerian%20Scammers...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Why%20Do%20Nigerian%20Scammers%20Say%20They%20Are%20from%20Nigeria%3F&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)
(`past` link)

 __Update: formatting __

------
jrs235
If you respond to someone claiming to be from Nigeria then you are probably
COMPLETELY unaware of the scam(s) related to Nigeria and therefore you are an
ideal target and victim. By mentioning they are from Nigeria, they quickly
filter out the informed and skeptical. This reduces them wasting their time
since the person responding is likely to be ignorant or naive regardless of
the reason for being such (unintelligent, mentally ill, old, isolated, or
desperate).

------
notahacker
There's a element of truth to the idea that really glaringly obvious opening
emails act as a filter for the most naive, but I suspect much of it is also
because scammers tend to be lazy, prefer to write about places and companies
they know about, copy other scammers' "formats" slavishly, aren't necessarily
aware that what sounds like a perfectly regular name to them tags them as
Nigerian to most readers whether they mention it or not, and are pretty sloppy
in their execution even if they start out pretending to actually be Blackberry
Lottery, London Mayfair. One big reason not to mention Nigeria, oil money or
large inheritances in the opening email is that even really unworldly people
have spam filters.

It's amazing how often even the relatively competently- executed scam listings
that appear place on classified and auction sites raises red flags up because
the reply email for Mrs Smith from Scotland detailing exactly how she'd like
to be paid a deposit by trusted payment service PayPal belongs to
princeadebayo or mrsolatunde. Still suspect they're more likely to make money
doing that than the ones who have to really, really cajole the rare credulous
person that replies to them to make that "deposit" for the 713,000,000 dollars
of inheritance money.

Worth noting the fact that Nigerians are also associated with more non-obvious
forms of online fraud is almost certainly damaging for those of Nigerian
heritage who actually are trying to conduct a bit of business or sell off
unwanted assets online.

~~~
lb1lf
I have worked in Nigeria on occasion, seeing as my employer has a presence
just about anywhere hydrocarbons can conceivably be coerced from the ground.

Several of the local companies I worked with had front companies in other
countries to avoid being dismissed as scammers off-hand - even by fellow
Nigerian enterprises...

My local agent once lamented that "The world mistreats us Nigerians; it is
such a shame that 99% bad apples give all Nigerians a bad name..." :-)

------
sl8r
Cf. The Dark Lord of the Internet [1] and the relevant HN discussion [2],
which give an interesting peek into the psychology of internet scams.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-
dark...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-
the-internet/355726/)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139)

------
jloughry
In the early 1990s I got a paper letter from a Nigerian scammer. It came in an
airmail envelope addressed by hand—almost completely illegibly—to my work
address. (Seriously impressed by the Post Office's diligence in parsing that
mess and delivering it.)

The letter was an _n_ th generation photocopy, the text the familiar appeal.
But they used to send them out on paper.

------
sopooneo
If this is all true, then why would we think that scammers who say they are
from Nigeria actually are?

~~~
xufi
Its funny you ask that but I've watched and read a few articles of Nigerian
scammers actually operating out of a country called Benin which is next door
to Nigeria itself and another country (which I forget the name of). Anyways,
from what I've read its basically the idea of trying not to implicate
themselves and moving to a country that is known much much lesser to a scale

------
osazuwa
I heard there is this weird statistical phenomenon where as the scammer, you
actually benefit from the email message being a little bit dumb. If it were
actually a plausible message without typos and obvious red flags, you'd catch
many more skeptical individuals in your pipeline. You spend time trying to get
these people to send money, but eventually they inevitably realize it is a
scam, and your time is wasted. Extremely gullible people however, won't be
deterred by typos and red flags. Therefore, typos and red flags filter out
skeptical individuals, enriching your pipeline.

~~~
tcpekin
That is exactly what the link/paper says, "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."

------
shubhamjain
Funny thing is I am one of those who actually fell for it when I was silly kid
who had just started using the Internet in 8th grade.

Of course, I didn't have a penny to pay but it felt like I am missing out on a
great opportunity. :)

------
rahimnathwani
A scammer from anywhere can (should?) claim to be Nigerian, for the same
reasons.

------
cpfohl
Dead link, but this is the exact title of a section in "Think like a Freak" by
Levvit and Dubner.

------
deckar01
> By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets
> the most promising marks to self-select

This is why I string scammers along as far as possible. I can't stop them, but
I can slow them down.

------
sengork
I find it quite interesting that nobody has yet mentioned "The 3rd Annual
Nigerian EMail Conference"

[http://web.archive.org/web/20120127023739/http://j-walk.com/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120127023739/http://j-walk.com/other/conf/index.htm)
[http://www.stearns.org/fun/nigerian-email-
conference.htm](http://www.stearns.org/fun/nigerian-email-conference.htm)

An oldie but goodie.

------
wp1
To qualify their leads

------
jessedhillon
Non-mobile link, which is more legible on a wider display:
[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=167719](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=167719)

------
mmwako
I reckon then that the best way to help people avoid these scammers, is to
actually answer their emails, therefore making the scammer go through tons of
false positives... interesting.

------
Avalaxy
Link is broken, Google cache doesn't have it. Mirror?

~~~
damian2000
Likely the answer here ...

[http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/96121/why-do-
phi...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/96121/why-do-phishing-
emails-have-spelling-and-grammar-mistakes)

This may well be for the same reason as many scammers rely on the tired old
'Nigerian Prince' strategy: by self-selecting for gullible targets, they can
be more efficient.

In phishing, as in scams, sending the initial batch of emails is the easy
part. The hard part is coaxing information out of the target (which can
require a concerted exchange of emails). That can represent a significant
investment of time.

As a result, it's really important to ensure that the people you correspond
with may actually give you the information that you're after. It can therefore
be advantageous to send a badly-drafted email, on the basis that the people
who respond to that are likely to be gullible enough to be phished.

~~~
athenot
It would be interesting to deploy a network of bots that responds to those
scams, posing as gullible targets. That would then significantly increase the
workload of scammers and reduce their availability to conduct scams on actual
people.

Thoughts?

~~~
overcast
There are groups that already do these types of things.

~~~
athenot
Oh nice! Would you happen to have a few names to guide a Google query?

~~~
damian2000
[http://www.autobait.com/faq/](http://www.autobait.com/faq/)

------
aj7
Exact strategy of Republicans, but differing statistics. Form a polarizing
ideology of economic claptrap and a combination of phony religiousty and
racism. Hone polarizing features. Find it suckers about 35% of the population.
Much higher hit rate than the Nigerian scam but same principle.

The 35% is a big problem. So combine it with a tax structure that favors any
non-employee and high wage employees. Hope for a majority,

------
pcora
seriously guys! you took research.microsoft down! :(

~~~
tremon
Probably hosted on Azure 2.0

------
vegabook
Ummm... because Westerners' prior beliefs about endemic corruption in Nigeria
is a given, which is what the scams are usually asking you to facilitate.

------
kazinator
Silly Microsoft.

Nigerian Scammers say they are from Nigeria because that's what makes then
"Nigerian Scammers".

Scammers who say they are from Cameroon or Botswana are "Cameroonian Scammers"
and "Botswanian Scammers", respectively and not, "Nigerian Scammers".

We might ask why Nigeria is a popular choice among scammers, as the country to
which to claim a connection or origin. But that is a different question. The
article seems to be trying to answer that question, but mostly fails. Yes, the
point is well understood that scammers have to pitch their proposal in such a
way that only the gullible will bite, who are likely to follow through.
However, it doesn't answer, "why specifically Nigeria?" Because to someone of
reasonable intellect, a scam letter claiming connections to Cameroon is just
as "comical" as one claiming connections to Nigeria.

Let me offer a hypothesis.

The choice of Nigeria may simply be some sort of unquestioned tradition among
scammers.

Perhaps it like the proverbial "onion in the varnish" (written about by our
dearly beloved Paul Graham himself:
[http://paulgraham.com/arcll1.html](http://paulgraham.com/arcll1.html)).

Maybe scammers learn scamming from other scammers via some hand-me-down
"Scamming HOWTO" documents, and those documents claim that using Nigeria works
(so just use it and don't question it). If the scammer newbies tried Cameroon
instead, they might find that it also works just as well, but they don't; they
stick with the shibboleth of using the "tried and true" Nigeria.

Perhaps at some time in history, the name Nigeria did actually invoke images
of financial corruption and could specifically appeal to some gullible
person's sense of greed. (Just like the onion in the varnish did once help to
identify temperature by how fast it caramelizes.) Today, Nigeria isn't any
sort of "poster country" for corruption in the popular imagination.

Interestingly, Nigeria is even used in scams that don't have to do with
financial corruption. Years ago, some woman claiming to be from Nigeria sent
me links to her profile: a dating scam! Just for fun, I started to send "her"
some conversations, discussing all sorts of Nigerian matters that I could
google up: current events in Nigeria and such. Then the story turned that
"she" is actually in Portland Oregon, but originally from Nigeria. LOL ...

Basically, scammers seem to be quite stupidly clinging to some formula
involving Nigeria, which they possibly pick up from their predecessors, and
are even naively applying it in irrelevant ways which have nothing to do with
any connection between Nigeria and corruption.

------
oferzelig
Why is a 2012 article published on Hacker News today?

~~~
eru
People submit all kinds of articles to the 'new' section all the time. Some of
them get upvoted to the front page.

