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> Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything? One technique scammers use in general is not to make things too legit b
by gtirloni 9y ago
> Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything?
One technique scammers use in general is not to make things too legit because that would attract people with a clue. Make it just barely credible and get the most gullible people possible.
So those fantastical emails about a rich prince in Africa that needs your help to cash $20m is just scammers improving their signal-to-noise ratio (or ROI). I think it works for these ICOs too.
- aianus 9y agoWhy? There’s no manual component to accepting money for an ICO, is there?
- codeisawesome 9y agoI never considered that scammers specifically tailor their message to be “dumb sounding scam” in a calculated way (to attract the right targets and repel others). I always thought it was just the nature of the intelligence level of folks who choose to scam rather than work to make something. It’s just even more pure, distilled evil - with no benefit of the doubt of stupidity - when viewed from this angle :-(
- zdkl 9y agoHanlon's razor has not been proven for cases with money involved.
- Maakuth 9y agoThere is even a research paper related to this phenomenon. Microsoft Research researched Nigerian scam e-mails. Turns out intentionally dumb messaging does help in filtering out targets that might be too smart to fall for the scam. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...