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Not sure why you're downvoted for an honest question. Take a look at this research paper linked above by another commenter on why scammers say they're from Nige

• danso 10y ago
  I second this paper. It's an easy read, even with its math. And more importantly, it's extremely intuitive: for me, it answered the question of if Nigerian scammers are already successful with obviously fake emails, why don't they just invest a little more effort into making the emails sound less outrageously fake? The general answer: If the scam emails were more sophisticated, they would attract the attention of smarter, more connected folks. These folks would still end up bailing out, but now the scammer is out the time they spent furthering the scam. But with a shitty, obviously scammy letter, you are only going to trick an extremely few recipients, but you have a much greater chance that they will actually send money. The wrinkle that email adds to the scam is that only with email do we have a medium in which a 1 out of 100,000 response rate can still be profitable. Furthermore, there are no gatekeepers between email sender and recipient. You couldn't easily pull a Nigerian scam by spamming Facebook users' walls, because even the most gullible of those users are likely to have a friend who will see and report the scam.