[nbar]

I’m always amazed that just slightly better grammar would increase the scammers success rate by miles.

There is no way I would read the correspondence as legit, but it’s not bad and given the return on the scam it’s wild that they don’t slightly improve that step.

[EliRivers]

I understand that it selects for the kind of the people who are more likely to be taken in by the whole thing. The scammers don't want to waste their time with people who will drop out of the process before handing over what the scammer wants, and if the number of people who will drop out is high enough, it becomes unprofitable; the scammer needs good leads who are more likely to be taken in.

Here's a piece from MS Research coming to that conclusion ("By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select")

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[saberdancer]

Why would this not be correlation not causation.

I struggle to believe that most scammers in the world are that good that make deliberate mistakes in their letters to reduce false positive rate. More realistic solution is that the average scammer is not well educated, he makes mistakes unintentionally and out of pure luck it works well for him.

About why they say they are from Nigeria, I'd say that simpler the scam is, easier it is to pull. If you communicate via voice, it is hard to properly mask accents. If you are sending something via money transfer, destination address is obvious as well.

[woko]

> I struggle to believe that most scammers in the world are that good that make deliberate mistakes in their letters to reduce false positive rate. More realistic solution is that the average scammer is not well educated, he makes mistakes unintentionally and out of pure luck it works well for him.

These people are doing it as their actual job.

The scammers are not kids who are having fun with a prank, or hobbyists who make mistakes because they do not spend enough time on the task. The scammers are smart human beings who do their jobs, as professionally as they can.

If they wanted a foolproof version of their text, they would be able to find an automated correction tool (e.g. on Gmail), or to ask someone to proof-read it. The fact that they do not is a hint that it is either a waste of time from their perspective, or detrimental to the efficiency of their jobs.

[whoooooo123]

Yes. Many scam operations are full-fledged "companies" which operate out of commercial office space and have a payroll of employees who show up to work every day Monday to Friday and scam people as if it was a normal job.

This is a fascinating YouTube series from a guy who managed to hack into the IT system of an Indian scam operation (including gaining live access to their security camera footage!) It goes into a lot of detail about how this particular outfit operates:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=le71yVPh4uk

[hyperman1]

Tye scammers don't have to be that good, as this is Darwin in action: Scammers with bad strategies are more easy to catch and less likely to make money. Evolution predicts that, if being a worse speller makes you a better scammer, after a while the average scammer spells worse. Having a good brain is actually a disadvantage here

[ncallaway]

It seems it wouldn’t need to be an intentional strategy, but could be selection pressure.

If it is an effective strategy, then scammers who have better grammar may find their scams less profitable, and move on to other jobs. While scammers that have worse grammar end up being more successful, so decide to continue.

(I’m not saying this strategy is effective, or that this is the mechanism that explains the relationship, just offering one possible explanation)

[StavrosK]

Yeah, that urban legend is often repeated but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

[swiley]

I wonder if there's something similar with apps and JS heavy websites.

[gogopuppygogo]

This might be intentional. The better the grammar the harder they have to try throughout the entire process.

Getting grammar wrong likely attracts the level of sophistication required to make the scammers job easy.

[fasteo]

That's seem to be the case [1]

"Therefore, it's in the scammers' best interest to minimize the number of false positives who cost them effort but never send them cash. By sending an initial email that's obvious in its shortcomings, the scammers are isolating the most gullible targets"

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are...

[nbar]

Interesting. You think it’s a deliberate verbal IQ filter implemented by the scammers?

[hnbad]

IQ is not a meaningful shorthand for anything, but yes, they want to catch the "idiot in a hurry", not someone who's paying enough attention that they could be set off by some smaller mistake later into the process, wasting the scammer's time.

[barry-cotter]

If IQ wasn’t a meaningful shorthand for anything it wouldn’t show positive returns for higher amounts at every level we’re aware of.

> Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? Comparing Linear and Nonlinear Effects of Cognitive Ability on Life Outcomes

> Despite a long-standing expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This divergence of beliefs presents an obstacle for evidence- based policymaking and decision-making in a variety of settings. One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). We empirically tested these notions using data from four longitudinal, representative cohort studies comprising 48,558 participants in the United States and United Kingdom from 1957 to the present. We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life. Most effects were characterized by a moderate to strong linear trend or a practically null effect (mean R2 range = .002–.256). Nearly all nonlinear effects were practically insignificant in magnitude (mean incremental R2 = .001) or were not replicated across cohorts or survey waves. We found no support for any downside to higher ability and no evidence for a threshold beyond which greater scores cease to be beneficial. Thus, greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental. https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf

[hnbad]

IQ was literally invented by a believer in "race science" and has been used to discriminate against ethnic minorities. That's its original function and its limitations are why it has been discredited by many sociologists for a long time.

IQ measures how good people are at IQ tests. As much as some people like to pretend otherwise, it does not measure "intelligence" by any meaningful definition and certainly nothing inherent or genetic. If you improve socioeconomic factors, IQ rises almost automatically.

People who do well in life don't generally score higher in IQ tests, they score higher in IQ tests because they had the means (access to education, parental wealth, access to mentoring and care as a child, etc) to do well in life in the first place.

The paper you're citing is guilty of HN's favorite academic crime: Correlation does not imply causation.

Inversely we've see plenty of historical evidence of higher IQ scores in groups being directly influenced by socioeconomic factors in populations where these factors have changed. It has also been demonstrated that training for IQ tests (or growing up in an education system that routinely uses similar exercises) improves the scoring on those tests.

IQ is a shitty shorthand because there are far more reliable factors you can use instead (e.g. generational poverty) in most scenarios without bringing an arbitrary metric in that only exists because of one scientist's obsession with demonstrating the superiority of the White race (followed by post-hoc rationalizations about Asians actually being "too smart" and thus still inferior, because that's the kind of nonsense you end up with by narrowly hyperfocusing on one made up stat so you don't have to deal with the complexity of socioeconomics).

[cudgy]

Seems like I recall reading an article that stated very high IQ corresponded to lower income and career success due to churn in their careers due to boredom factors. This makes intuitive sense as well.

[weswpg]

who suggested that being intelligent was bad? the problem is that there's no "universal intelligence test" and reducing human intelligence to IQ testing is what those "race science" people do.

[slumdev]

There's a lack of self-awareness about language ability deficiencies in certain countries where a coarse, pidgin-like "English" has developed without feedback from the rest of the English-speaking world.