I always thought they identified themselves as Nigerian because if you went through with the scam you'd end up having to make a bank transfer to a Nigerian bank.
This one's been linked to a few times before but it's not really compelling enough to beat the alternate hypothesis: slavish copying from people who are lazy, greedy and not particularly inventive, and also usually ultimately need a reason for their mark to specify Nigeria as the destination country for their money transfer.
Same goes for the Nigerian scammers who go off piste by pretending to be a little old Scottish lady with an expensive item to sell via PayPal but ruin their probably much higher hit rate by using their obviously Nigerian male personal email address for correspondence and not writing English in the manner of a little old Scottish lady. Being able to scam people by actually acknowledging their Nigerian origin is as much down to lacking the ability to pretend to be non-Nigerian as selecting for a more gullible audience (It's not like sending initial carbon-copy responses asking for deposits/money-transfer fees or bribes is especially time consuming, or like there isn't a huge number of somewhat-less-naive people willing and able to send a competent scammer a "deposit" for an imaginary good or service if they have access to accounts on reputable online payment systems)
There's a danger in attributing to counter-intuitive interpetation of statistics what can adequately be explained by ignorance and impotence.
All of them look very Nigerian to my eyes. Maybe if that blogger looked past his own cultural bias, he would notice there is variation amongst themselves.
Either Nigeria needs to be globally known for something really amazing (like a center of innovation, which will take a very long time to be recognized), or individual Nigerians need to walk away from the "Nigerian brand" and all that it stands for in the eyes of the global community, which unfortunately, is not much more than 419 scams.
Sometimes when a brand goes sour, or it no longer fits with long-term goals, it's better to walk away from the old and create a new one.
Yep. It's a bit like the theory that scammers mention they're from Nigeria because they're ingeniously weeding out all the people who've heard of the scam before, and not because they need an excuse for people to send money to Nigeria (and with their culture and education level the ALLCAPS and religious references look very official and honest indeed), and if the cost of that is that 99.99% of their emails don't get delivered due to automatic filters protecting even the most gullible of recipients, well that's probably not something they've given much thought to.
Interestingly, the stereotype, has caused a large dent in the country's reputation (Paypal won't allow Nigerians to recieve funds) and there's a percievable reduction in the number of scammers from Nigeria. I believe many scams that claim to be Nigerian now are only taking advantage of the stereotype.
This stereotype has also made getting jobs considerably harder for sincere freelancers like me. And if I happen to find a client, I treat them like gold; I always work beyond expectation in an attempt to prove I'm not a stereotype.
It's frustrating though.
Were Nigerians (allegedly) the only ones making fraudulent applications? Why is it only Nigeria you could use as an example?
Perpetuating nasty cliché tropes lead to stereotyping. Perhaps, that's your intention or not, but I just need to inform you and your ilk, that anytime a Nigerian is unfairly discriminated against off or online, you contributed to it.
I don't really think that makes any difference to the point made.
The overall idea is that it is helpful for them to present an image that less gullible people will immediately write off as a scam, so as to reduce the responses to a set of people that are gullible enough to be profitable to pursue.
The ideal scenario for these people is to be busy all the time dealing with the most gullible potential victims rather than chasing people who will balk at sending them money. Any more responses than they can deal with, and they'd be better off filtering out more of the less gullible people by making their initial approach more likely to send poor targets running.
Presenting themselves as Nigerian is one way of increasing the odds of triggering alarm bells with the less gullible people, but by no means the only alternative.
There's also every reason to assume that a reasonable number of scammers are simply clueless and try these scams because they think they'll make money, not because they've actually found a method that is viable for them, so you'd expect to see a reasonable chunk of scammers that don't do the optimal thing anyway.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't want to disparage this guy too much but if I'm from Nigeria, I would bend over back backwards to appear legit. I wouldn't advertise gimmicks like "cheap money" or "Phd., MSc, etc."
>Such articles like this one stereotype Nigeria in a falsely negative manner.
Err, the author actually WENT to Nigeria to meet her actual Nigerian scammer -- and others doing the same. What stereotype? She doesn't say that most Nigerians or only Nigerians do such things -- but that's what happened to her.
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