I read a fascinating article and paper recently: "Research Reveals Why Spammers Claim They're Nigerian
A new paper claims obvious spam email is used to weed out all but the most gullible people online." http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/06/20/nigerian_spam_email_why_spam_email_is_so_obvious_.html This is about a Microsoft research paper: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf This is a brilliant analysis. I have never heard of the idea before. The gist of it is in the headline: Internet scammers living in the U.S. often claim to be Nigerian bankers, and they make up the most outrageous, hackneyed and unbelievable stories. They want to eliminate all but the most gullible potential victims. Here is the title and abstract from Microsoft: "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? ABSTRACT False positives cause many promising detection technologies to be unworkable in practice. Attackers, we show, face this problem too. In deciding who to attack true positives are targets successfully attacked, while false positives are those that are attacked but yield nothing. This allows us to view the attacker’s problem as a binary classification. The most profitable strategy requires accurately distinguishing viable from non-viable users, and balancing the relative costs of true and false positives. We show that as victim density decreases the fraction of viable users than can be profitably attacked drops dramatically. For example, a 10× reduction in density can produce a 1000× reduction in the number of victims found. At very low victim densities the attacker faces a seemingly intractable Catch-22: unless he can distinguish viable from non-viable users with great accuracy the attacker cannot find enough victims to be profitable. However, only by finding large numbers of victims can he learn how to accurately distinguish the two. Finally, this approach suggests an answer to the question in the title. 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." I expect similar predation strategies exist in nature. A gray hawk nests close to my house. She often flies just above the trees, in a straight line, making an ungodly noise that every prey animal for a mile around knows that only a hawk will make. It is as if she is announcing her presence, speed and vector. It is the opposite of the stealthy sneak-up-and-grab technique of a cat. It is more like what a pack of wolves will do. I assumed this was flush out animals and birds that panic. Maybe not. Maybe it is form of the Nigerian scam strategy. The hawk drives off the fast prey animals, leaving only slow, immature, sick or old animals lagging behind, which are the preferred targets for any predator. To bring this discussion on topic -- When I read this, I could not at first think of why it bothered me. Then I realized. I have often said that Rossi could not be a con-man because he inspires no confidence. On the contrary, he makes most people I know want to run for the exits. Now I wonder . . . could it be that he *is* a con-man, and he is using a predation strategy similar to these fake Nigerians. - Jed
