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Comment by saberdancer | Hacker News Reader

Why would this not be correlation not causation.

I struggle to believe that most scammers in the world are that good that make deliberate mistakes in their letters to reduce false positive rate. More realistic solution is that the average scammer is not well educated, he makes mistakes unintentionally and out of pure luck it works well for him.

About why they say they are from Nigeria, I'd say that simpler the scam is, easier it is to pull. If you communicate via voice, it is hard to properly mask accents. If you are sending something via money transfer, destination address is obvious as well.

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> I struggle to believe that most scammers in the world are that good that make deliberate mistakes in their letters to reduce false positive rate. More realistic solution is that the average scammer is not well educated, he makes mistakes unintentionally and out of pure luck it works well for him.

These people are doing it as their actual job.

The scammers are not kids who are having fun with a prank, or hobbyists who make mistakes because they do not spend enough time on the task. The scammers are smart human beings who do their jobs, as professionally as they can.

If they wanted a foolproof version of their text, they would be able to find an automated correction tool (e.g. on Gmail), or to ask someone to proof-read it. The fact that they do not is a hint that it is either a waste of time from their perspective, or detrimental to the efficiency of their jobs.

Yes. Many scam operations are full-fledged "companies" which operate out of commercial office space and have a payroll of employees who show up to work every day Monday to Friday and scam people as if it was a normal job.

This is a fascinating YouTube series from a guy who managed to hack into the IT system of an Indian scam operation (including gaining live access to their security camera footage!) It goes into a lot of detail about how this particular outfit operates:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=le71yVPh4uk

Tye scammers don't have to be that good, as this is Darwin in action: Scammers with bad strategies are more easy to catch and less likely to make money. Evolution predicts that, if being a worse speller makes you a better scammer, after a while the average scammer spells worse. Having a good brain is actually a disadvantage here

It seems it wouldn’t need to be an intentional strategy, but could be selection pressure.

If it is an effective strategy, then scammers who have better grammar may find their scams less profitable, and move on to other jobs. While scammers that have worse grammar end up being more successful, so decide to continue.

(I’m not saying this strategy is effective, or that this is the mechanism that explains the relationship, just offering one possible explanation)

Yeah, that urban legend is often repeated but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

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