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Maybe it’s like the apocryphal rumour that spelling mistakes in scam emails are really a filter to get rid of a large chunk of people who wouldn’t fall for the

Maybe it’s like the apocryphal rumour that spelling mistakes in scam emails are really a filter to get rid of a large chunk of people who wouldn’t fall for the scam anyway.

arcturus17 7y ago
Does that make sense from a behavioral-economic perspective? What is the scammer’s incentive to filter certain people out? Wouldn’t it be better to move more people down the “funnel” and filter potential troublemakers as they appear?
- edouard-harris 7y ago
  Generally in a sales process, the further down the funnel you get (as a prospect) the more of your counterparty's time you'll be consuming. A mass-email might trigger a call, for example. I think the idea is that the scammers might be pre-qualifying their prospects for gullibility before committing further time to closing the sale.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    That's exactly it, similar to the Nigerian scammers reference (usually spam) in the article. See: 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-...
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  As best as I can tell from a cursory look it originates from this research originally published in 2012: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/WhyFromNigeria.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... Via the book Think Like A Freak which I’d guess extrapolates from it. But it seems like one of those ideas that has gone from plausible explanation to fact in popular imagination.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  The more invested someone gets, the more likely they are to kick up a fuss when they decide it's a scam. If you were pitching this deck, you don't want prominent, angry VCs posting publicly on Twitter about how it's a scam. If you weed them out right at the beginning, exposure doesn't happen as quickly. Moving down the funnel means increasing time investment for the scammers, too. Better to spend those hours on someone gullible.
rrdharan 7y ago
The author speculates this as well in the article: > Maybe this strategy is similar to how the Nigerian scammers work: put some obvious errors in the text, anybody that misses those is probably well worth the time invested and those that cancel early would have cancelled anyway, an optimization strategy.

Maybe it’s like the apocryphal rumour that spelling mistakes in scam emails are really a filter to get rid of a large chunk of people who wouldn’t fall for the scam anyway.

arcturus17 7y ago

Does that make sense from a behavioral-economic perspective? What is the scammer’s incentive to filter certain people out? Wouldn’t it be better to move more people down the “funnel” and filter potential troublemakers as they appear?

edouard-harris 7y ago
Generally in a sales process, the further down the funnel you get (as a prospect) the more of your counterparty's time you'll be consuming. A mass-email might trigger a call, for example. I think the idea is that the scammers might be pre-qualifying their prospects for gullibility before committing further time to closing the sale.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  That's exactly it, similar to the Nigerian scammers reference (usually spam) in the article. See: 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-...
meheleventyone 7y ago
As best as I can tell from a cursory look it originates from this research originally published in 2012: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/WhyFromNigeria.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... Via the book Think Like A Freak which I’d guess extrapolates from it. But it seems like one of those ideas that has gone from plausible explanation to fact in popular imagination.
ceejayoz 7y ago
The more invested someone gets, the more likely they are to kick up a fuss when they decide it's a scam. If you were pitching this deck, you don't want prominent, angry VCs posting publicly on Twitter about how it's a scam. If you weed them out right at the beginning, exposure doesn't happen as quickly. Moving down the funnel means increasing time investment for the scammers, too. Better to spend those hours on someone gullible.

rrdharan 7y ago

The author speculates this as well in the article: > Maybe this strategy is similar to how the Nigerian scammers work: put some obvious errors in the text, anybody that misses those is probably well worth the time invested and those that cancel early would have cancelled anyway, an optimization strategy.