How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible...

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Posted: Sun May 11, 2014 8:30 pm

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303647204579546293797700508

Interesting article in the Wall St. Journal. It starts talking about both how King Solomon of the Bible and David Lee Roth of Bon Jovi employed game theory.

It also discusses why many Nigerian scammers use "outlandish" stories in their emails. Short answer - to weed out "false positive" email replies.

There is more in the article, but here is an excerpt:

Quote:

Which might lead you to wonder: If the Nigerian scam is so famous, why would a Nigerian scammer ever admit he is from Nigeria? That was the question Cormac Herley, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research, began to ask himself.

He'd never thought much about the Nigerian scam until he heard two people mention it from opposite angles. One talked about the billions of dollars the scammers earn. The other noted how stupid these scammers must be to send out letters full of such outlandish stories. How, Dr. Herley wondered, could both statements be true? If the scammers are so dumb and their letters so obviously a scam, how could they be successful?

He began to examine the scam from the scammers' perspective. (An August 2012 article in these pages discussed Dr. Herley's research.) For anyone wishing to commit fraud, the Internet has been a wondrous gift: It makes it easy and cheap to send out millions of bait letters to potential victims. But converting a potential victim into a real one will require a good deal of time and effort.

Imagine that for every 10,000 emails you send, 100 people take the initial bait and write back. The 9,900 who trashed your email haven't cost you anything. But now you start to invest significantly in those 100 potential victims. For every one of them who wises up or simply loses interest, your profit margin decreases.

How many of these 100 will end up actually paying you? Let's say one of them goes all the way. The other 99 are, in the parlance of statistics, false positives.

So how can a Nigerian scammer minimize his false positives?

Dr. Herley, while modeling this question, identified the most valuable characteristic in a potential victim: gullibility. Who else but a supremely gullible person would send thousands of dollars to a faraway stranger based on a kooky letter?

But how can a Nigerian scammer tell who is gullible and who isn't? He can't. Gullibility is, in this case, an unobservable trait. But the scammer could invite the gullible people to reveal themselves.

How? By sending out such a ridiculous letter—including prominent mentions of Nigeria—that only a gullible person would take it seriously. Anyone with an ounce of sense or experience would immediately trash the email. "The scammer wants to find the guy who hasn't heard of it," Dr. Herley says. "Anybody who doesn't fall off their chair laughing is exactly who he wants to talk to." Here's how Dr. Herley put it in a research paper: "The goal of the e-mail is not so much to attract viable users as to repel the nonviable ones, who greatly outnumber them."

So if your first instinct was to think that Nigerian scammers are stupid, perhaps you have been convinced, as Cormac Herley was, that this is exactly the kind of stupid we should all aspire to be. The ridiculous-sounding Nigerian emails seem to be quite good at getting the scammers' massive garden to weed itself.

So, in other words, when we bait, we are generating gullible "false positives" for the scammers. Very Happy

Posted: Sun May 11, 2014 8:39 pm

I read that report when it first came out. While there is obvious truth in the fact that only the most gullible people fall for some of these scams (I exclude a vast number of others, like Craigslist, romance, work-at-home etc.) I don't believe that the lads are deliberately trying to 'weed out' the less gullible. With very few exceptions, they just aren't smart enough to be crafting their formats to deliberately repel the less gullible recipients.

They are just relying on chance. I don't for a second believe that these lads are deliberately dropping in multiple references to Nigeria as a potential turn-off to more savvy recipients. They're just using proven formats and hoping to get lucky.

But yes: baiters are false positives, and we obviously mess with their minds. And sometimes with their income. Very Happy

Posted: Mon May 12, 2014 1:40 am

I have to agree with JF. Lads work in volume, sending several thousand emails at a time to get perhaps a dozen or two replies. That's a small but precious rate of return that the typical lad will want to at least try to exploit.

If you want to test the good Doctor's hypothesis try answering your next ten lad emails with "F*ck off, scammer!" I think you would be surprised by how many come back with "thank you for your positive reply, let's do business."

Posted: Mon May 12, 2014 2:30 am

^All very interesting...but we are glossing over an important part of Nigel's post.

Quote:

David Lee Roth of Bon Jovi

What the duck?? Shocked

Posted: Mon May 12, 2014 4:13 am

^^ Good catch! I always confuse those crap 80s bands Van Halen and Bon Jovi.

They just do not compare to Spinal Tap.

Posted: Mon May 12, 2014 11:31 pm

Justcold wrote:

^All very interesting...but we are glossing over an important part of Nigel's post.

Quote:

David Lee Roth of Bon Jovi

What the duck?? Shocked

My thoughts exactly!!!

Nigel: How can you say that Bon Jovi is a crap band! Evil or Very Mad

Posted: Mon May 12, 2014 11:44 pm

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