[winchling]

The reason these scams seem so crude and obvious, as I learnt from Daniel Dennett, is that they're designed that way. They filter out the vast majority of the population. The scammers can then focus on trying to reel in potential victims, in a series of verbal/written exchanges, from the tiny pool that remains.

[michaelcampbell]

I've read this for years, and I'm still not sure I buy it. It smells to me like the same sort of thing as when pundits say Some High Ranking Executive in Govt(tm) does something nonsensical it's because of some cleverness or cunning that we just can't see, when my suspicion is that he is just nonsensical.

[graeme]

But it isn't nonsensical: filtering your client base into qualified leads is sales 101.

You wouldn't advertise tax law services to 100% of the population. Nor would you want to high touch sales on 100% of the population for a sex scam.

I'm sure some amount of it is explained by incompetence, poor english skills, etc. But if that was a real detriment to sex scamming, it would have been worked out of the market.

[precisioncoder]

Interestingly enough if a large amount of people replied to fishing emails they would become unprofitable as most of those people would not be tricked into sending them money. If anyone felt like a charity project a chatbot that contacted spam senders could put a lot of these scam operations out of business...

[daniel-cussen]

I agree. The real solution is false victims, there to demand larger time commitments from the scammers.

[dsjoerg]

Holy crap that could be a public charity. You donate $10 to help keep a service running that honeypots the scammers. Like an automated / machine-learning version of kitboga, the guy on twitch who scams people and thousands of people watch him do it.

[Afton]

There is automation for this for telemarketers: https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

[yummypaint]

This is a really good idea. I bet the people on scambaiting forums would be eager to collaborate and provide convo logs etc.