Jun 23 - Those Nigerian Email Scams Are Ridiculous For A Reason

It's hard to imagine today that anyone who gets an email from a person claiming to be a wealthy Nigerian prince wouldn't immediately know it was scam. Yet this technique is still being used by hundreds of fraudsters.

Why? It's actually a brilliant strategy designed to save time and maximize profit by immediately identifying only the most gullible marks, according to an analysis by Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research.

In other words if you're a fraudster, you want your email to be totally ridiculous:

Since gullibility is unobservable, the best strategy is to get those who possess this quality to self-identify. An email with tales of fabulous amounts of money and West African corruption will strike all but the most gullible as bizarre... Those who remain are the scammers ideal targets. They represent a tiny subset of the overall population.

The goal of the email is not so much to attract viable users as to repel the non-viable ones, who greatly outnumber them. Failure to repel all but a tiny fraction of non-viable users will make the scheme unprofitable.



Back in 2009, we interviewed Nuhu Ribadu, former head of Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, about these email scams. He told us they were remarkably successful.

"It is amazing if you know how much money those guys got," said Ribadu. "Within a short period of time, we were able to recover $750 million dollars."

Ribadu told us the people who ran these scams were living large on that money:

...they were literally like celebrities. They were the big guys in society, sponsoring people for public office. They were the ones with convoys and big cars. They would occupy front seats at ceremonial things and social events.

Ribadu convicted several of these fraudsters. As for the money they stole, he says his office traced victims across the world to return whatever they could.

My people [pic]

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It was an ideal environment for Onwuhara, 27, a brilliant, pug-faced visionary who favored True Religion jeans and Ed Hardy shirts. Looking out over the neon skyline of downtown Dallas, it was easy for the crew to believe his[..]urances: He'd make them rich. When the sun glinted off one of his $100,000 diamond-encrusted Audemars Piguet watches, who could doubt it? Every few months he would buy a new Maserati or Bentley. He owned expensive properties in Miami, Dallas, and Phoenix. He even had a secret love condo in the W, where scantily clad women visited in such numbers that one bellhop became convinced that the first-generation Nigerian-American was a [..] director.

Onwuhara was clearing about $7 million every two weeks, according to the FBI.

My people are the !! of the earth and should be wiped of it

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No one beats this guy even though he didn't live in Nigeria


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Clearing $14 Million/month.

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People are fuccin retarded. Do the emails tell how the prince got your email address?

Ah, Me Naija brothaz been getting long moneh ah

they got my cousin for $2k back in 07 with a lottery scam...She didnt talk to me for like a year after I !! on her for falling for it..Still comes up in every family get together

No one beats this guy even though he didn't live in Nigeria


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Clearing $14 Million/month.

nice i !!ing love storys like this, im gonna read this now. only difference between this guy and the government/banks is this guy is probably in jail.