Why some scams are designed to be easy to spot

There's a good chance that every day your email 'junk' folder fills with all sorts of scams. And when you cast a glance over them, it's easy to wonder why the scammers don't put a bit more effort into them. Why are they always supposedly from a Nigerian prince? Why are they written in such an unsophisticated way? And why are they riddled with spelling errors? The reason for all of this may not be what you think.

The scams involved here are the notorious Nigerian 419 scams, where a criminal sends out batch emails claiming to be a Nigerian prince trying to recover a fortune. All he needs from you is a sum of cash, and in return you'll be handsomely rewarded when he gets his hands on his fortune. Of course, this is all nonsense. The scammer is no more a Nigerian prince than you are, and the only fortune he or she is going to amass is from gullible people who are persuaded to send their money.

Most people can spot that these are scams. They've been doing the rounds for more than a decade, they have received widespread publicity from those who have fallen from them, and they have ensured that when asked where a scam email is most likely to come from, the most common answer you'll get is 'Nigeria'.

The surprising twist

The fact that these scams are so well-known, and yet still continue, prompted a researcher at Microsoft called Cormac Herley to write: 'Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?' He posed the question that given that the entire email is a lie, why wouldn't the scammers lie about their location? His answer was surprising.

He concluded that it was a method used to filter out the skeptical. He pointed out that the mass email costs very little for the scammers, and that the thing that costs them time, energy and money, is communicating with everyone who responds. If they make the email too attractive, they will get too many responses from people who will eventually back out, and they will have to invest more time and money.
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The use of the Nigerian location and the unsophisticated approach is to weed out those people who might wise up to the scam part of the way through the process. They only want to hear from people who are so gullible that they fall for an obvious Nigerian 419 scam - and the only way to do that is to make it an obvious Nigerian 419 scam.

This isn't the only scam to use this approach: there's the absurd email from IT support asking for your password, the email promising you a tax refund, or the one from your bank asking for your account details.

These are all now so familiar that they ring the same alarm bells - and rest assured that they are intended to. They only want responses from people who haven't heard the many hundreds of warnings about these scams over the years. Otherwise, they're going to end up wasting their days emailing people who never pay up.

This all comes with a word of warning though. Although some scams are designed to be easy to spot, there's another breed of scammer who is constantly trying to think of a new way to trick people out of their money or personal details. So while we can all raise our eyebrows at the silliness of the Nigerian scam, it doesn't mean we can afford to drop our guard against more innovative and newer approaches.

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