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Scammers appear intentionally bad at their first contact in order to weed out people who are too smart.

Sending mass spam emails to random addresses is cheap. But interacting with someone who replies is costly, because it requires a real human to write a custom response. If they interact with marks who are smart enough to become suspicious as soon as they ask for money in advance, then they are wasting their time. They only want to spend their time on the most gullible marks who never question anything. When one responds to the classic "I am a prince of Nigeria" email, then they obviously have never heard of the advanced fee fraud scam, so they are a potential victim worth spending time on.

And by the way: Not all scammers actually come from the country they claim to come from. 61% of those which get traced are in fact located in the United States. Claiming to come from an exotic location is often part of the ruse.

Scammers appear intentionally bad at their first contact in order to weed out people who are too smart.

Sending mass spam emails to random addresses is cheap. But interacting with someone who replies is costly, because it requires a real human to write a custom response. If they interact with marks who are smart enough to become suspicious as soon as they get asked for money, then they are wasting their time. They only want to spend their time on the most gullible marks who never question anything. When one responds to the classic "I am a prince of Nigeria" email, then they obviously have never heard of the advanced fee fraud scam, so they are a potential victim worth spending time on.

And by the way: Not all scammers actually come from the country they claim to come from. 61% of those which get traced are in fact located in the United States. Claiming to come from an exotic location is often part of the ruse.

Scammers appear intentionally bad at their first contact in order to weed out people who are too smart.

Sending mass spam emails to random addresses is cheap. But interacting with someone who replies is costly, because it requires a real human to write a custom response. If they interact with marks who are smart enough to become suspicious as soon as they ask for money in advance, then they are wasting their time. They only want to spend their time on the most gullible marks who never question anything. When one responds to the classic "I am a prince of Nigeria" email, then they obviously have never heard of the advanced fee fraud scam, so they are a potential victim worth spending time on.

Scammers appear intentionally bad at their first contact in order to weed out people who are too smart.

Sending mass spam emails to random addresses is cheap. But interacting with someone who replies is costly, because it requires a real human to write a custom response. If they interact with marks who are smart enough to become suspicious as soon as they ask for money in advance, then they are wasting their time. They only want to spend their time on the most gullible marks who never question anything. When one responds to the classic "I am a prince of Nigeria" email, then they obviously have never heard of the advanced fee fraud scam, so they are a potential victim worth spending time on.

And by the way: Not all scammers actually come from the country they claim to come from. 61% of those which get traced are in fact located in the United States. Claiming to come from an exotic location is often part of the ruse.

Scammers appear intentionally bad at their first contact in order to weed out people who are too smart.

Sending mass spam emails to random addresses is cheap. But interacting with someone who replies is costly, because it requires a real human to write a custom response. If they interact with marks who are smart enough to notice that they will eventually notice that there is something fishy when the scammers ask for money in advance, then they are wasting their time. They only want to spend their time on the most gullible marks who never question anything. If you respond to the classic "I am a prince of Nigeria" email, then you obviously have never heard of the advanced fee fraud scam, so you are a potential victim worth spending time on.

Scammers appear intentionally bad at their first contact in order to weed out people who are too smart.

Sending mass spam emails to random addresses is cheap. But interacting with someone who replies is costly, because it requires a real human to write a custom response. If they interact with marks who are smart enough to become suspicious as soon as they ask for money in advance, then they are wasting their time. They only want to spend their time on the most gullible marks who never question anything. When one responds to the classic "I am a prince of Nigeria" email, then they obviously have never heard of the advanced fee fraud scam, so they are a potential victim worth spending time on.