[ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sun, 25 Dec 2011, spike wrote:

> Imagine this scenario.  A lone Nigerian cooks up some really cool idea, 
> Microsloth buys it, so now the software developer has a ton of money, 
> completely legitimately, more than that lone genius could possibly 
> spend. Every day the geek's inbox overflows with all these absurd spams 
> claiming to be Nigerians wanting to give some random internet user a 
> million US dollars, if they would simply give their name, address, SSN 
> and bank account number, in order to know where to transfer in the 
> money, and make it legal of course.
> 
> So imagine this perfectly legitimately rich Nigerian with a sense of 
> humor and absurd generosity writes a perfectly true but 
> indistinguishable from spam offer, along with a script to distribute it 
> to random internet users, explaining that a Nigerian wants to give away 
> a pile of money, if the recipient would merely supply a name, address, 
> social security number and bank account number.  The Nigerian fully 
> intends to give that pile of money to the first person to supply that 
> info, all completely necessary to make it theoretically possible to 
> actually deposit the money into the recipient's account.
> 
> How many pseudo-spam messages would she need to send out before anyone 
> would fall for the truth?

Ten years ago, I guess 10-100 mails would have been enough to hook at 
least one idiot. After he got rich, his idiot buddies would have seen this 
as an real life proof that Nigerian spam really worked and they would 
allow to be e-skinned alive by some other spammer(s).

Nowadays, ISPs that I would consider to be anything like my hosts are 
actively pushing quite a lot of spam out of my view. Anyway, I don't see 
much of this most of the time. So nowadays, the number would be 
10-infinity, depending if "my" kind of ISPs are the norm or not. I suspect 
they are not so again, 10-100 should be enough. 

It could be closer to 10 if he tried to help it a little - like, doing 
some clever estimate about addresses who may be willing to get caught. Not 
sure if such estimate is easy to do but this could make his idiot-search 
much more effective.

But to be frank, I reject your whole concept. If the Nigerian was wise 
enough to grab some MS money without slaving himself, he sure would be 
wise enough to think of something more constructive than giving it to 
somebody who obviously was not very clever and would waste them buying 
himself luxury car and gaming in Vegas (I assume it says something when 
one responds to spam). An example of more constructive thing I would 
consider right now is a micro-loan fundation aimed for helping his 
neighbors. However, I have never analysed this scenario with pen and old 
envelope, so maybe there is something even more constructive.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **