Adumbration

Another of my semi-regular podcast cycle is that from WNYC's "On the Media", with Bob Garfield and (edited by) Brooke Gladstone.  Sometimes a little too earnest and precious in their approach to the story, but often nonetheless a good take on topics related to social communication.

That's where I first heard this explanation for why those Nigerian e-mail scams appear to be so obviously a scam.  A recent episode discusses this analysis from Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley - the scams are so obvious because the perpetrators need to filter out the people who won't end up sending money.  They need to be so obvious that they only ensnare the most gullible and naive members of the on-line community, because everyone else will eventually recognize what's going on and not end up sending any money to them.  From the paper:

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.

The OTM story also points out a potential response to these scams - to bombard the scammers with false positives - responses to the scam appeals that cause the scammers to waste their limited resources on what will ultimately be unfruitful interactions.

A couple related tidbits:  according to Wikipedia, Nigeria is the third most frequent source for these appeals; the US and UK contributed more.  There is also a cottage industry to people who are up to scamming the scammers, such as the people at sloshspot, and the ebolamonkeyman.