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Comment by calimoro78 | Hacker News Reader

The answer from the paper:

"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."

Basically the scammer needs to reduce false positives (email recipients who are unlikely to become victims) and adding some outlandish detail ensures that only the real fools will be fooled.

Reminds me of a school class mate who had a very low success rate with girls, and switched successfully to better odds by a similar strategy: "If you talk about you, and your life, and where you come from for ten minutes, and she is still there listening, then you know you have a chance."

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> Reminds me of a school class mate who had a very low success rate with girls, and switched successfully to better odds by a similar strategy: "If you talk about you, and your life, and where you come from for ten minutes, and she is still there listening, then you know you have a chance."

Reminds me how I found my current piano teacher. I'd bang incessantly on the white keys with the pedal fully depressed for a full ten minutes. If the teacher hadn't thrown me out by that point, I knew I'd found a good one.

Now that she's got me on energy drinks and ear plugs and I can go a full four hours without stopping. We think that should be enough music to start getting some paying gigs at restaurants. So I'm using the same 10 minute white-key bang session for my auditions to filter out the good restaurants, but unfortunately I haven't found any yet.

Still, my teacher says to keep my head up and my ear plugs in. As long as I continue with the lessons the gigs are sure to come.

All in all it's an incredibly satisfying and productive relationship!

Persistence is the key

Persistence on the keys

> Basically the scammer needs to reduce false positives (email recipients who are unlikely to become victims) and adding some outlandish detail ensures that only the real fools will be fooled.

And then you get people like James Veitch, "This is what happens when you reply to spam email":

* https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_...

> Veitch recorded three TED talks in 2015 and 2016.[17] One chronicles Veitch's encounter with a supermarket chain's marketing emails, and the other two are about scam emails.[18][19][20]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Veitch_(comedian)

That is an impressively terrible relationship technique, but I suppose the repulsion strategy works when someone's goal is to con only the most vulnerable of victims.

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