I suppose it boils down to this "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."
It seems so obvious now but I never realised this on my own. I suppose the take-away lesson is that there is an art to even the most (seemingly) hare-brained schemes.
I can't see that they'd continue doing it if they didn't get some sort of result.
At the least, a very small number of valid email addresses, an even smaller number of postal mailing addresses, and a vanishingly small number of financial interactions.
I have read in local news about few people falling for some of the Nigerian scams. The issue is that only some cases come out, others feel it better to hide their foolishness and not report.
It's like all those stupid adverts you see on TV for mega-extreme-fitness-workout or call-meet-super-sexy-local-girl. Always wondered who would actually but this rubbish or call those stupid premium rate numbers, but the very fact there are so many of them must mean someone does!
"for mega-extreme-fitness-workout or call-meet-super-sexy-local-girl"
That's actually a little different. When people are desperate they are willing to go with emotion instead of rationality. That's why they travel overseas for miracle cures even though rationally what they are doing doesn't make any sense at all.
There is also the greed factor which is somewhat similar and why people go for "to good to be true" things if the price is low enough.
There is a blogger who I will not name that has chosen to go with godaddy $9 hosting for his quite popular blog (he used to pay $100 for a VPS or something like that) and he truly believes that gd will give him unlimited everything at that price point just because that's what the site says. While he is not particularly savvy in terms of hosting and technical things (by his own admission) his greed (if I can call it that) makes him overlook and ignore the obvious.
I'm sure someone can point out the exact psych principles that are involved here.
Those ridiculously too-good-to-be-true hosting deals are awesome if you've got a blog that nobody ever reads. The instant one of your posts goes viral, expect your page to be unceremoniously shut down with no call or email to you. Which is of course the worst possible time for it to be shut down-- while it's on front pages of social aggregators and such.
Source: personal experience (Bluehost, not GoDaddy)
Questioning both the GP's cases and your's require not only critical thinking but also a little domain knowledge.
Reading "unlimited bandwidth" doesn't imply that's not the case unless you know from experience or hearsay that there are heavy conditions.
Same thing with "lonely girls in your down", how am I to know that's not true on face value in this particular area and that rather it's a common come-on.
I think we like to think optimistically and assume people mean what they say in general.
Scamming is not remotely a hare-brained scheme. It's an incredibly reliable method for getting rich by exploiting the gullible if you know how to do it. That "if" is a huge if. And there's the whole ethics thing.
And gullible needs to be emphasized. A lot of people seem to think scammers only get the greedy, which is not true. For example, how are fake charities targeting the greedy? Or the grandparent scam? [1]
That site is really depressing. When they make him woodcarvings and take pictures and read audiobooks for him, you realize those people are just completely desperate and trying to make ends meet any way they can.
There's a huge difference between saying "tormenting these scammers, vigilante-style is unsettling and perhaps distasteful" (the takeaway I got from the This American Life story) and saying "Nigerian scammers are good people".
They can be bad people, some of their number may have murdered people, but I don't think that makes any and all actions toward them justified.
It's very much like the predators who detect and hunt the weakest prey in a herd. Sects target the weakest people too. It's not just the email scammers.
Madoff's 'customers' mostly believed that he must be doing something not quite kosher, but they thought they could still make money off of it.
This is a significant thing. My anecdotal understanding (from talking to my wall st friends) is that his clients basically thought he was screwing someone else (with his trading operations) so that his fund could do so well.
I wonder if this effect also takes hold in Nigerian emails scams. Would their success rate go up if they implied they were screwing someone else out of the money?
Isn't that the point of the Nigerian scams - the money is always illegal (some corrupt politician / foreign aid money) that needs to be got out of the country - so you feel you are "in" on the real scam?
It also discourages you from reporting it once you have sent off any money.
Honestly, I havent' gotten one in a while. I do recall some that seemed very legit (no implication that victim would be in on fraud). It was inheritance, and there were banking regulations that to be worked around, etc. Adding a taste of fraud seems like smart choice for the attacker.
From what I've read of the succesfull ones - as the victim sends more money more details of who was/has to be bribed, how the money was obtained, how the bank regs are broken are revealed.
Ultimately it becomes a carrot/stick - if you send more money you will get closer to the pay out BUT if you don't send more money we will reveal your role to the police/banks in your country.
Don't underestimate the herd effect, too. Once you get a group to buy into a scam, they'll form a support group to rationalize it to each other, no matter how ridiculous it gets to an outsider.
This pretty much explains the behavior of the scammers posing as "Microsoft Support" that geeks and techs love to laugh at and post funny recordings from.
Many ads (including a lot in Facebook) for cellphone money-sucking subscriptions operate in the exact same way. Writing such a stupid message that only very unintelligent people would click and therefore getting the best ROI they can (when they pay per click).
