-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jesse 1 Robinson Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 17:08
JR> The idea of deliberately dumbing down language in spam is preposterous. First of all I don't understand the purported logic of it. BB> Radoslaw's logic seemed clear to me, but when I set out to spell it out for you, I began to wonder whether I'd mistaken it. He wrote "a method to filter out bright people and leave only the fools", which I interpreted this way: Intelligent people (according to Radoslaw) are less likely to produce profit for the scammer, in the long run. If the scam is written badly, an intelligent person is more likely to throw it out, and thus less likely to waste the scammer's time with replies that will in the end lead nowhere. Fools, meanwhile, will not notice (or notice less) the atrocious writing, and thus be more likely to proceed. I'll leave it to him to say whether I read him correctly. But ~if~ that is indeed the scammer's motive for writing badly, I think the scammer isn't thinking very clearly. The next part of your comment I think is just a confusion about who said what. I said Nigerians are mostly capable of better English than I see in "Nigerian old ministers' " emails, but that's just a side comment, not part of Radoslaw's reasoning. JR> 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. BB> I don't buy that last part. I have no idea how many spammers have been to University, or secondary school, but they can't ~all~ be illiterate and therefore it's not unlikely - just the reverse - that some of them will be able to compose a grammatically correct email. No one said anything about "undetectable"; for verisimilitude you'd want ~some~ degree of "foreign-ness". --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* ...in your bedchamber do not curse a king, and in your sleeping rooms do not curse a rich man, for a bird of the heavens will carry the sound, and the winged creature will make the matter known. -Ecclesiastes 10:20 */ -----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 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. -----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
