Scammers Don’t Be a Maga

“Maga" in Nigeria is translated as “FOOL”

Scammer appeared on Newsweek.Picture by Newsweek 

This is one more report on scammers. Don’t  fall prey because some of them make a living at it, so they have to be good. If they are so good why the misspelled so many of their emails?

by 

Franklin Veaux

(Reader of Quora)

Analysis of large numbers of scam emails and interviews with scammers led to the conclusion that the poor writing is intentional.

Scam emails have two phases. The first phase is low-effort, low-return. The second phase is high-effort, high-return.

Sending the emails is low effort. The spammer clicks a button and a million emails go out. Poof! Nothing to it.

It’s also low return because out of those million emails, only a few people will respond.

The second phase is communicating with those two or three people who take the bait and respond.

This is where the spammer must invest a lot of time and effort. It can take weeks of constant communication with a maga (Amharic [Edit: Yoruba, not Amharic] slang in Nigeria for “fool”) to get the maga to give you money.

A scammer does not want to waste time talking to a victim for a week or two only to have the victim wise up and walk away without giving the scammer any money. The scammer wants to make sure that only the dumbest of the dumb—the intellectual bottom of the barrel, the absolute cream of the gullible crop, the ones without the barest shred of critical reasoning skills—will respond to the emails.

From the scammer’s perspective, in terms of return for time invested, it’s better to weed out a victim who might give him money (but might also get wise halfway through) and instead focus on the very dumbest and most gullible marks.

Spelling errors, bad grammar, distorted logos—these are all tools to weed out marks who might start out gullible but then think twice when the moment comes when they need to actually send money.

The poor grammar and spelling mean that fewer people reply, but the ones who do reply are more likely to fall for the scam.

Scammers on Social Media.Im sure you might recognize this one but not his name because every name is his name. He concentrates on guys over 50, single. Contrary to most scammers who use other people’s pictures Nam convinced this guy might look like this because he has too many pictures ready to go on different days, different circumstances. Don’t those eyes look sincere?