The idea of deliberately dumbing down language in spam is preposterous. First of all I don't understand the purported logic of it. More important, while English is an official language in Nigeria, it is no one's mother tongue. It's learned, mostly in school, to whatever proficiency the learner can achieve. The average spammer has probably never stepped inside university. Even secondary school certification is improbable. Add to that the 'dialectical' difference between Nigerian and American English makes it unlikely that the most fluent spammer could write something of undetectable of origin.
Let's get real. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW robin...@sce.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Bob Bridges Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 10:19 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: (External):Re: Caution: "Hacked" email caused the distribution of a potentially harmful attachment CAUTION EXTERNAL EMAIL Interesting hypothesis. I always supposed that they were badly written either because a) scammers don't care (which is perhaps another way of saying they're illiterate, or b) these Nigerian-oil-minister scams actually are written by foreigners whose English is bad - not, perhaps, by actual Nigerians, whose English is usually better than that - or c) they want to ~appear~ to be written by Nigerians. It never occurred to me that it might be an anti-intelligence filter. But then, I take it as an article of faith that it's not intelligence that'll save you from being scammed. It's not the smart people who fall for "I want you to handle my money for me"; it's the greedy ones. And greedy people are foolish, but they're not necessarily stupid. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* War is God's way of teaching Americans geography. -Ambrose Bierce */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of R.S. Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 10:00 3. Puzzle: why Nigerian scam emails are so horribly written? I mean a lot of language mistakes. The answer is this is intentional. This is a method to filter out bright people and leave only the fools. Only fool people are good candidates to further steps of scam, which are expensive because that require manwork. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
