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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>It seems convincing if you don’t just how many email and street address pairs are effectively public

I don't think it's that convincing even if you're unaware of that fact because if someone tries to "sextort" you, if they've indeed owned you, why wouldn't they just send you a piece of that footage? I'd assume anything else is by default a bluff even if I knew nothing about tech

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Remember that this is a numbers game. They don’t need to convince everyone, just enough people that they make a profit. Say they get their hands on a breach data set with 50 million people – if you live in a low cost of living country with negotiable law enforcement like, say, Nigeria or Russia how many of them do you need to sucker at $1,400 apiece to pay for the cost of generating a few million emails? I’d bet that anything over the first few is pure profit.

Also, you want your scam to not be too sophisticated as that would make your live harder. A less sophisticated scam will auto-filter those with critical thinking skills upfront, so you don't even have to try to convince them. Which gives you more time to focus on those you can convince.

See the classic Cormac Herley research: “Why do Nigerian scammers say they’re from Nigeria?”

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

> Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. 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.

yes, but doesn't apply here. there's nothing complicating anything. they either pay or they don't. but if you have to engage in communication to make the scam work then you'd want to weed out the smart people.

It only takes a moment of weakness to fall for it, you need to spread information of these scams so people are prepared for it. Sex is shamefull for so many people that they will not talk about being scammed.

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