Why is it that people believe that foreign dignitaries would actually be trying to transfer large amounts of stolen money into the first world through email contacts? The Nigerian scam takes many forms, but it always relies on our greed. There is a variation that concerns wealthy people who are terminally ill and want to give their money to people who will use if charitably, but those are not as common. Setting up a charitable organization takes the kind of paperwork that leads to questions that are likely to expose the scam. Scams rely on targeting the people most likely to fall for the bait.
Greed is a powerful motive. Even stand up philosophers have first hand experience with greed. Producing a population that can swallow socialism requires producing a population that thinks with its emotions and has its eyes clouded by its own greed. It is never a good thing to confuse ‘I think’ and ‘I feel.’ You are never more vulnerable as when you deny your vulnerability.
I have never been a fan of email marketing and I make no secret of that. The fact that people will actually fall for the trash that I read about in my junk email astounds me. No amount of stand up philosophy seems to give me an understanding of this mind set. However, the Nigerian scams are amongst the worst ideas in email marketing. Would you trust a crook that came to you, out of the blue, asking for help with a crime and promised to give you a large cut of the take?
Once, I got a scam message that I was tempted to reply to. The contents of the message was that the scammer was looking for a Christian because Christians could be trusted. We do have high standards that we are expected to live up to. Yet, the scammer wanted help transferring stolen money into the United States of America. I am supposed to be trustworthy for having a faith that I am supposed to violate as part of the agreement being entrusted to me?
So, why is it that people fall for these scams? I was actually told that my email address had entered itself into a contest that I had won. The truth is that I could use the millions that I am supposed to have won in all these lotteries that I never entered. After taxes, I might have enough left to pay for my car insurance. Are people actually so greedy that they never check out the stories that strangers tell them in scam laden email?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 1:29 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.