[FDSGSG]

It's so very hard to believe that it would be the notoriously unsophisticated Nigerians¹ pulling off high-end deepfakes. These guys weren't smart enough to use a proxy, but were supposedly smart enough to produce a good deepfake.

If this really happened, there must be some easy to use public tool they used. I'd really love to see the video.

¹ There's no way anyone else would log into a stolen account from a Nigerian IP.

[gramie]

I don't think that the Nigerian scammers are necessarily unsophisticated. Their scam emails intentionally contain enough red flags that any reasonably intelligent person will recognize the scam and not reply.

This way, the only replies they get are from people who are extremely gullible and/or desperate. It allows the scammers to avoid wasting time on targets that have a low probability of success.

That said, there are certainly plenty of stories about Nigerian scammers who are themselves not very bright or perceptive (is the 401Eater website still up and running?).

[pixelgeek]

> I don't think that the Nigerian scammers are necessarily unsophisticated. Their scam emails intentionally contain enough red flags that any reasonably intelligent person will recognize the scam and not reply.

It is actually deliberate. It has been part of scams like that for decades

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/9346371/Nig...

It used to be seen in scams sent via the post as well.

[FDSGSG]

>I don't think that the Nigerian scammers are necessarily unsophisticated. Their scam emails intentionally contain enough red flags that any reasonably intelligent person will recognize the scam and not reply.

The "nigerian scams" are extremely unprofitable compared to even mildly sophisticated scams like BEC or basic craigslist scams. I think it's safe to say that they're unsophisticated.

>That said, there are certainly plenty of stories about Nigerian scammers who are themselves not very bright or perceptive (is the 401Eater website still up and running?).

Yeah, because the actually intelligent ones are generally running very different scams.

[m00x]

Why would Nigerians be unsophisticated? Are you assuming someone from Nigeria wouldn't be smart enough to make deepfakes?

[FDSGSG]

I think you can ask anyone working with threat intel about this. Nigeria has the least sophisticated cybercriminals in the world, they're very prolific but the tooling they use is hilariously bad.

I'm sure there are some exceptions, but those would probably be smart enough to conceal where they came from.

This isn't really surprising. Obviously Nigerian cybercriminals will be less sophisticated than the Russians for example, just look at their schools!

[dylan604]

Right? Their prince was the first email scam of note, and probably one of the longest running ones at that. Also, you know VPN/VoIP numbers exist to help mask the identity/location of scammers. Just in case some of that might have slipped the mind of some peeps.

[FDSGSG]

Nobody would choose to use a Nigerian VPN while logging into stolen accounts. This is really obvious.

> Their prince was the first email scam of note, and probably one of the longest running ones at that.

And all of the Nigerian prince spammers are incredibly unsophisticated. Anyone in the industry can tell you this, you can just look at the manner in which they send their emails.

[dylan604]

Nobody you say? Sounds like the perfect cover then. Or, you know, for the lulz.

[FDSGSG]

Almost anything is possible, but this is still by far the least likely explanation.

Why needlessly alert the victim when you could just choose a proxy in their city?

>Sounds like the perfect cover then

How would that even work? It's not like this would provide any kind of an advantage. In what kind of a threat model could this possibly be beneficial?

[k4runa]

The phone number linked to the instagram account is also a +234 number now which is Nigerian based.

[throwaway29303]

Maybe this is related https://therecord.media/how-the-pandemic-pulled-nigerian-uni...