There really must be one born every minute

[jhetley]

Okay, you can shrug at all the Nigerian Scam/Spanish Prisoner spam zipping around the email universe, figuring that each message costs nothing.  So a return rate of suckers on the range of well under one in a million can earn(?) you a decent living.

But I got one in snail-mail this morning, from South Africa.  Not the first time -- one a few years back actually came from Nigeria.  That costs cold hard cash, which puts a whole new perspective on the odds.  Proof that a significant percentage of the human race falls for those things . . .

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

They aren't doing it because it works; they're doing it because they think it works.

Sometimes it does work, yes. But some Nigerian letters are so badly written that they're unlikely to fool even the most foolish. And spam in Italian, French, or German sent to people in the US can't have a very high success rate.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

This example is well-written for the sort, and as a peculiar "personalization" they hit (by chance, I'm sure) on Younger Son's name as the person who had lots of money and died, along with his equally-fictional girlfriend named as beneficiary in the will, in an auto accident. Don't know if the alleged will has/had a survive-two-months clause to eliminate _her_ family from the loot . . .