I was cleaning out my junk folder a short while ago when I noticed the following subject line.
"These technique will destroys the US Lottery system."
I have always wondered why the scammers do not bother to run a spell check and grammar check on the messages they send out. It would stand to reason that if you wish to snare someone gullible enough to believe that they could partake of a deceased despotic dictator's hidden riches, you might want to deploy a little more finesse in your communications.
After I ran a Google search for why Nigerian Scams have bad grammar, I learned that the scammers are far more devious. They have to send out millions of mail messages to get a few hundred responses, of which a few can be lured into transferring some money to an untraceable destination ostensibly to help grease the process of moving the millions. Here is where the bad grammar comes in. If the messages were sent out in better English and the contents seemed more plausible, the message might attract more educated people, most of whom would get suspicious soon enough and not transfer any money. Playing email tag with such 'false-positives' would be a waste of time for those blokes sitting in some cyber cafe in wherever.
By deliberately using bad grammar and ridiculous plots, the spammers are actively causing only the not-so-educated and gullible to self-select themselves into responding. The conversion ratio on these people is likely to be higher.
The best way to eliminate this scourge would be for educated people to respond to these scams in large enough numbers and cause the spammers to use up a lot of their time in responding to leads that are going to be dead ends. Eventually, they might figure out it is not worth their time. Unfortunately, you and I have better things to do with our spare time.
Perhaps it is time for some bright engineers from an IIT to start work on a project to write a bot that will respond to Nigerian Scammers with natural language responses and keep them occupied.
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