Also other countries have different scams. I ran an import export and frequently pakistan scammers looking for an business visa would try to fake a business with you.
They would waste hours of your time before dropping the act, annoucing they cant pay $ 10k and really just want to illegally work in your country.
Way worse.....one guy did actually show up after conning another guy successfully. Turns out he was legit in business but wanted to inspect wares first before wiring a ton of cash. That was a shock when he showed up on my doorstep. Imagine the nigerian prince dude you told to get lost ringing your doorbell 6 months later!!!!
Good ol alibaba chats...
We (Romania) prefer to steal credit card numbers instead. Less work and instant benefits!
I haven't been to Romania but did notice and personally experience credit card numbers being stolen in Greece, especially in tourist areas in Athens, presumably via skimmers.
Or Article : http://gizmodo.com/5919818/why-nigerian-scammers-say-theyre-...
Quite clever and counter-intuitive really.
The takeaway as I recall is that filtering out potential victims who have heard of the scam as quickly as possible is the most profitable move.
The idea is this: Nigeria is a common place for such online scams. It is so well known, that only the most gullible and unaware people would believe and respond to the emails. And, guess what kind of people the scammers are looking for ...
Using a different place runs the risk of getting too many responses with a high percentage of those who are smart enough to soon quickly realize it is scam, so now scammers wasted their time on that.
They'd rather use bad English, really stereotypical phrases and so on. It is a good filter.