Why Nigeria?

A fairly large fraction of the spam advertising the chance to capitalise on stolen riches is sent by Nigerian criminals.  What should be more surprising is the fact that a lot of the spam actually says it’s from Nigeria (or other West African nations).  Since everyone knows about Nigerian scams, why don’t the spammers claim to be from somewhere else? It’s not as if they have an aversion to lying about other things.

A new paper from Cormac Herley at Microsoft Research has a statistically-interesting explanation:  the largest cost in spam operations is in dealing with the people who respond to the first email.  Some of these people later realise what’s going on and drop out without paying; from the spammer’s point of view these are false positives — they cost time and money to handle, but don’t end up paying off.   A spammer ideally wants only to engage with the most gullible potential victims; the fact that ‘Nigeria’ will spark suspicions in many people is actually a feature, not a bug.