Understanding the Scam

The Friday File: Internet scammers must minimize false positives (targets that are attacked yet yield nothing) and false negatives (viable targets that are not attacked). It’s because scamming costs time and money and misidentifying false positives is very costly. To hone in on top targets, scammers say they’re from Nigeria, misspell words, and deliberately make grammatical errors. It’s seems counterintuitive, but being profoundly implausible reels in the most likely suckers.