Obvious scams are a lot easier to dismiss without worry than ones that actually look like potentially credible legal threats.
You're just blaming the victim here, possibly because you're biased by the hindsight of already knowing the legal threat was never real in the first place.
More damage, probably. But the thing is one would have to be well schooled in English to write a truly legitimate sounding one, and that would probably mean growing up in an English speaking country. That probably means that you live in an English speaking country (or other developed country) so you hopefully have some better options than being a scamster, and there is probably more local law enforcement to stop you. That's the universe balancing things out - not that I'm defending it at all. All that said, I'm sure some better written scams do exist.
I wonder what the most convincing scams are (the ones for which some HN folks would maybe fall)...
Same. It's interesting but the people scammed themselves say that they don't care about the money - they're all multi-millionaires. Does't inspire pity or anger on the readers part.
Some say scammers are very smart, and that they deliberately use every trick in the book to tap into our psychological weaknesses and make us act irrationally. But I have the feeling that, 90% of the time, scammers are just told to write an "official-sounding" message – which is the same thing that the hypothetical human who wrote this template was trying to do: that's why the result is so similar. No doubt the use of the word "urgent", or capitalizing the words "Duty" and "Taxes", come from this attempt at making the message sound more formal and official, from someone who is definitely not a skilled writer.
I was talking about why victims are many times reluctant to talk to the police or others when they've been scammed. My comment was not in response to the article, but to another comment.
Frankly you seem to be looking for some kind of argument where there is none.
I used to buy into the idea, but it increasingly grates my intuition as time goes on. I'm at a point that I believe much of the misspelling, poor grammar, etc are not intentional. If the same scammers were better at what they did, they'd snare more marks. I think these scammers are only capable of exploiting the bottom of the barrel when it comes to discerning audiences, though.
This article makes the assumption that scammers don't mean to have bad grammar. But I thought they did, to weed out observant marks before wasting any time on them.
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.
While we've all heard the theory that poor spelling can be a tactic used to make their communication seem less credible and make it easier for them to trick people, I'm skeptical.
Many scammers may not be native English speakers and may not have a strong grasp of the language. Another possibility is that scammers simply don't put a lot of effort into their spelling and grammar because their primary focus is on making money, rather than creating well-written communications.
What drivel. They overpromised, lied to people, broke the law. I recall at least one story that also claimed that their blood testing was unreliable, thus endangering people’s lives.
There is absolutely no sympathy necessary here. You may empathize with the feeling of loss, but concluding that they are not scammers because of that is absurd. “Best intentions” do not matter if your actions contrast with them.
God help us if the scammers ever find someone who can write correct English. I know many people get caught by these scams, and I suspect that the numbers would increase if the wording was improved a bit.
There's a metaphor about conversions and copy-writing and startups in there somewhere.
I am sorry for the people who transferred their savings to those scammers. What astonishes me is how many people are willing to perform illegal things (because what those scammers are offering always requires to do something illegal).
You are an excellent example of how people who are abusive have consistent worldviews that justify the abuse. You are placing 100% of the responsibility on the weaker party in the contract, and 0% on the people who designed the contract plus everything that leads up to and comes after the contract. At the same time you clearly understand the human cognitive limitations that make people susceptible to carefully-designed exploitations, you act as if the people who design the scams are not just innocent but justified in taking advantage because money.
And with that, I'm done. You are very dedicated to both exploitation and victim-blaming as justification. I'm not going to convince you otherwise, presumably because you made or make your living from that. “It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it," said Upton Sinclair, and I have better things to do with my time.
Your comment claimed that most scam victims believed they were doing something illegal; I don't think that's a reasonable claim without evidence.
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