Nigerian scam

About Those Nigerian Email Scams

readingbyeugene 2 Comments

If you’re reading this blog, or have used the Internet for some time, no doubt you’re familiar with the Nigerian scams. The big question, though: why are these scam emails written to sound so overwhelmingly unbelievable? Who the hell is going to (and does) fall for them?

Cormac Herley from Microsoft Research has been involved in interesting research: figuring out why scammers often claim they’re from Nigeria [PDF link]. Herley specializes in machine learning, and his finding is that the scammers aren’t interested in seeming believable. They just want to find the most gullible victims they can, to maximize their return on their effort.

[I]f the goal is to maximize response to the email campaign it would seem that mentioning ‘Nigeria’ (a country that to many has become synonymous with scams) is counter-productive. One could hardly choose a worse place to claim to be from if the goal is to lure the unwary into email communication…

“Since gullibility is unobservable, the best strategy is to get those who possess this quality to self-identify. An email with tales of fabulous amounts of money and West African corruption will strike all but the most gullible as bizarre. It will be recognized and ignored by anyone who has been using the Internet long enough to have seen it several times. It will be figured out by anyone savvy enough to use a search engine and follow up on the auto-complete suggestions [of search engines]. It won’t be pursued by anyone who consults sensible family or friends, or who reads any of the advice banks and money transfer agencies make available. Those who remain are the scammers’ ideal targets. They represent a tiny subset of the overall population.

A less outlandish wording that did not mention Nigeria would almost certainly gather more total responses and more viable responses, but would yield lower overall profit. Recall, that viability requires that the scammer actually extract money from the victim: those who are fooled for a while, but then figure it out, or who balk at the last hurdle are precisely the expensive false positives that the scammer must deter…

The hypothesis makes sense: if you can weed out the non-gullible population from the start, the odds of your scamming efforts will surely increase.

###

(via Gizmodo)

A Profile of the Nigerian Scam Artist

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

If you use email, then you’re no doubt familiar with the Nigerian scam letter, otherwise known as the 419 scam (419 is a section of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud).  You’ll receive an email saying that you or your family has come under a massive wealth, but you must relinquish some funds in order for processing of these funds to proceed forward.

But who are the people behind these scams? Known locally as “Yahoo Boys” because they prefer to use Yahoo! email accounts, Joshua Oyeniyi Aransiola, Ph.D., and Suraj Olalekan Asindemade, M.Sc in the Department of Sociology and Anthropolog at Obafemi Awolowo University (Ile–Ife, Nigeria) conducted interviews with these Nigerian scam artists and published a paper (abstract below) about their lives and proclivities:

A lot has been written on cybercrime and its prevention, but the problem has proved particularly resilient to remedial action. Desperate and vulnerable individuals in every continent continue to fall into its trap. Despite this, there is dearth of descriptive study that attempts to unravel the strategies employed by the perpetrators in Nigeria, as an important precondition for workable and reliable policy direction to address the problem. This article has filled this gap by using data from 40 cybercrime perpetrators selected with snowballing technique. The findings revealed that most of the cybercrime perpetrators in Nigeria are between the age of 22 and 29 years who were undergraduates and have distinctive lifestyles from other youths. Their strategies include collaboration with security agents and bank officials, local and international networking, and the use of voodoo that is, traditional supernatural power. It was clear that most perpetrators of cybercrime were involved in on-line dating and buying and selling with fake identity among others. The article discussed the need for reorientation of Nigerian youths in higher institutions, and various methods as guiding principles for potential victims. It recommended a complete reorganization of the Nigerian Police Force and Economic and Financial Crime Commission, as some of the officers in the institutions aid and abet cybercrime. It finally suggested a review of the Nigerian law guiding the operations of banking, poster agencies, and various speed post services in the country, as these are necessary preconditions to effectively combat the problem.

New Scientist has a brief post summarizing the paper, the best part of which is this:

Nigerian scammers make regular use of voodoo. As one Yahoo Boy put it: “The Voodoo thing exists for real, I have used it but I have stopped because of the fear of repercussion. With the aid of Voodoo the money comes faster. I have friends that still use it, they can collect money twice or thrice a week and it helps. I have a friend that uses a calabash filled with black substance; he hides it in his room and says incantations.

###

Related reading: this piece in TechCrunch, profiling Ibrahim Boakye, “a genius in the land of chronic unemployment.”