My previous whimsical posting has prompted several pertinent comments leading me to this marvellous site: 419 Eater.

I now know more about this scam industry – much of it (but not all) originating in Africa – than is healthy.

Some of the exchanges between Scambaiters and the would-be scammers intended to trick the scammers into wasting their time are very fine. See the reverse Harry Potter trick (producing many real pages of laborious scammer handwriting) and Derek Trotter’s wife (he wishes…).

As a reader points out, the IT needed to generate all those zany email introductions may not be especially clever:

… the only thing they need is a program (‘spider’) to gather some e-mail addresses from all around the web. Then they just put hundreds of Nigerians in front of their PCs in gloomy internet cafes and start the operation. In order to steal the money they must engage in a lengthy e-mail exchange and the response rate is minimal.

Perhaps that is why scammers do not hire people speaking English – multiplying even a modest rate by the number of different messages, the profits do not cover the expenses (I think).

Sounds about right. And recalls the clever explanation in Freakonomics of why in fact most drug dealers are poor:

In other words, a crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage. Notwithstanding the leadership’s rhetoric about the family nature of the business, the gang’s wages are about as skewed as wages in corporate America. A foot soldier had plenty in common with a McDonald’s burger flipper or a Wal-Mart shelf stocker…

… Which means that you stand a greater chance of dying while dealing crack in a Chicago housing project than you do while sitting on death row in Texas. So if crack dealing is the most dangerous job in America, and if the salary is only $3.30 an hour, why on earth would anyone take such a job?

Maybe in the event I was wrong on the core point. A well-written elegant scam letter would not be convincing to most people as a potentially plausible human-interest hard luck story from Africa.

Hmm. It all comes down to marketing. I happen to be put off by excessively poor English. If they want to communicate with me, they need to do their research better! So there.

Or at least show the prolific imagination and even sheer wit exemplified in the Viagra spam emails which Gmail so wonderfully separates out for me, of the Amaze her with your Mighty Wonder-snake variety.

Writing those email leads could employ me rather well. How does one get into that line of work? Suggestions?