Spam, spam, spam, spam
The curse of spam is one with which every reader will be familiar. It’s now just one more daily task to eradicate the emails that slip past the spam filter of our email programs, usually playing on one or the other of the top two human desires: sex and money.
Maybe this is just part of being a professional editor, but I am always struck by the poor quality of the spelling and grammar in the famous Nigerian emails from supposed royalty or former government officials seeking my help in spiriting their ill-gotten booty out of their poverty-stricken country. (By the way, the essence of this mail scam is actually over a hundred years old. If you’re interested, read a thorough history of this type of mail fraud here.)
I have often wondered, ‘Why don’t they run a spell-check on these things. Wouldn’t they get more responses if the emails looked less obviously shonky?’ But look a little closer and you will discover that the weird, old-fashioned language and the errors are quite deliberate, and are performing a very specific function.
In fact, spam emails are an excellent lesson in knowing your audience.
You and I are not the audience for spam emails.
Rather, the targets are the lonely, the vulnerable and the naïve. The preposterousness of most of these emails performs the function of weeding out the informed and the critical.
Not to say those of us who identify with the latter camp aren’t vulnerable to con artists ourselves, but if you’re sending out two million emails, you want to qualify your prospects very carefully. It’s no use getting 100,000 replies if you only have 50 people in a call centre in the bustling Nigerian capital, Lagos, to respond and get targets on the hook. Better to attract a small number of prospects who are more likely to buy the ‘product’ than a large number of skeptics who will never bite.
While casting their net extremely widely, those emails are designed to appeal to a very specific type of person – and proof of the accuracy of the scammers’ psychological insight is in the durability of this particular scam over not decades, but centuries.
