From The Economist
Blatancy and latency: Why internet scams seem so obvious
IN FAULTY English, the e-mail describes vast riches in search of an owner. Your new pen pal just needs your bank account to park the money—and will pay richly for the favour. In fact, the fraudsters will empty your account, or sucker you into paying fees for cash that never materialises.
Though Nigeria is well known as the source of such tricks (called 419 scams after the relevant paragraph in that country’s criminal code), many crooks make puzzlingly little attempt to hide their origins. In a new paper*, Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research has used maths to show why: blatancy is a means of weeding out all but the most credulous respondents....
Jenna Burrell, who studies online scams and is at the University of California, Berkeley, says many African fraudsters are now pretending to be non-African to look more credible....