Nigerian Scams and One-Night-Stands

Nigerian Scams, also known as 419 scams or advanced payment scams, originated as Spanish prisoner scams. Originally Spanish prisoners wrote as many letters as they could to wealthy people, telling them that they have a hidden treasure buried in the Spanish woods, that they would share with the person who would pay their bail. The modern form talks about a Nigerian prince trying to unlock his heritage, with your help of paying the minimal fee of 1000USD. The prince will then share the major heritage with you. The scam comes in different shapes but boils down to an advanced payment. The email is mostly poorly written, has no documentation attached, and always mentions Nigeria. These factors should alarm everyone. Economists are puzzled by this. It seems to be such a small hassle for the scammers to download a free trial of Grammarly and fix the spelling mistakes. Furthermore, sending over a fake document, ordered on Fiverr for 6USD also seems like a good investment. And what about not using the country of Nigeria, but rather change it up with Algeria? These things cost very little and would make the e-mail so much more legit. Looking at their cost structure it seems that they do not want to look legit. First, I will discuss why the “Nigerian” scam is best performed by scaring people off, rather than luring them in. Next, I will link this strategy to a hypothetical scenario of picking up girls in a night club.

So why write such unsophisticated emails as a scammer? Imagine you run a scamming company in Ghana. You employ 2 scammers who send out emails and reply to the emails for 10 h a day. To reply to an email takes an employee 6 minutes, thus 10 emails in an hour. In sum your company can reply to 200 emails each day. Let’s say company policy is to reply within 24 hours leaving you a total of 200 people you can correspond with. You acquired a list of 10 million e-mail contacts. You are now faced with two options: write your sophisticated email and get a 0.1% respondence rate leaving you with 10000 potential clients. That’s way too many. You won’t be able to filter out who is most likely to pay. So, what you do is, you scare off smart people and try to target the most vulnerable, by sending out the worst email you can think of. First of all, this will decrease your respondents to something like 200 people, and secondly you know that people responding to the worst email ever are pretty likely pay, and keep on paying for various scams. The actual cost of scamming is not sending out emails or trying to be as believable as possible. It is trying to sort out who is most willing to pay and building trust with them. Thus, sending out emails with spelling mistakes and using “Nigeria” increases your chances of successful payment, while decreasing your cost of answering thousands of people.

In a “hypothetical” example Kruxi goes into a nightclub and is looking for a one-night-stand. He is facing a similar cost structure to the Nigerian scammers. There are 100 girls in the club. He “hypothetically” doesn’t care who he will have sex with. The club closes in an hour and he spent too much time discussing his latest blog post with his friends. What is the optimal strategy for him to get laid?

Strategy 1:

He goes up to a hipster girl with a stunning smile. He tries to be charming, making a good and trustworthy impression on her friends. Kruxi gets drinks for her and her mates, they laugh and make suspiciously long eye contact more frequently so as the night progresses. 10 minutes before the club closes, she introduces me to her boyfriend and says: “OMG you guys would get along so well”. That’s the worst possible strategy. Kruxi just wasted his opportunity on a one-night-stand.

Strategy 2:

Instead, Kruxi must exclude the taken and unwilling candidates as soon as possible. The chatting up part isn’t costly, only the fruitless charming part is. Thus, Kruxi must exclude people as fast as possible. He starts with a Nigerian-scam-email-like pickup line, saying the worst thing imaginable. “Mother Theresa was a horrible person” (which I actually truly believe) “Playing World of Warcraft was the best time of my life” (I also believe that) are just some examples. Saying horrible one-liners is the equivalent to writing a bad scam email. It excludes candidates that are not interested, immediately, thus eliminating the possibility of Kruxi wasting valuable time. But if a person responds positively the likelihood of her being interested is way higher than a positive response to a sophisticated mating spiel.

In conclusion, sometimes exclusion is the most important part of optimizing. Scammers don’t waste time with unlikely prospects, so why should Kruxi?