how to shut up Nigerian IM scammers quick

I leave my instant messaging client, Trillian, running pretty much all the time I’m at work. And among the nice messages I get from family and friends, I also get my share of Nigerian scammers. These scammers pose as young single women from somewhere in the US, who just happen to be out of the country on a modeling job. If you chat with them long enough, you’ll get an urgent request for a Western Union money transfer. But I’ve chatted with enough of them that I can spot the scammers pretty quick. The conversations always start out pretty much the same, like this:

[11:50] west_minstergirl_4_real: hi
[11:50] Todd404: hello
[11:50] west_minstergirl_4_real: ding
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: hi how r u doing?
[11:51] Todd404: I’m exceptional
[11:51] Todd404: how are you?
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: great
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: am fidelia
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: 29
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: from illinois
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: u?

A couple telltale signs: First, they never write “I am Fidelia”. It’s always “am fidelia”. I’m guessing that whatever language the Nigerians natively speak doesn’t start sentences with a personal pronoun. So when they learn their bad English, they leave the “I” out. Second, they often use this “ding” thing, which I think causes a beep in some IM clients (though not mine). And they always use pseudo net speak. It’s never “Hi, how are you doing?” It’s always, “hi how r u doing?”

The above conversation doesn’t show it, but they occasionally misspell the name of the place they’re supposedly from. For example, I was chatting one time with a scammer who chose – for whatever stupid reason – to pretend to be from Schenectady, NY. Now for most Americans, that’s a darn hard city name to spell. But I imagine that anyone who was really born and raised in Schenectady can spell the name of their home town. But this particular scammer spelled it three different ways in the course of a 2 minute conversation.

One day a few months ago I decided I needed a fake persona, too. Just as these scammers all claim to be international models from the US, I’ve decided that my fake persona is going to be a Nigerian. They often write “a/s/l” which – for those of you who are older than 20 means “please tell me your age, sex, and location”. So I started writing back things like “95/M/Lagos”. My fake online persona – the 95 year old male Nigerian – also just happens to be a swimsuit model. Absurd? Yes. But some of the scammers are so dumb, they just keep on conversing with this make-believe swimsuit model.

Not today, though. As I was running some automated tests at work, I got an IM out of the blue that started like usual, but “west_minstergirl_4_real” was a little smarter than most. Here’s the whole conversation:

[11:50] west_minstergirl_4_real: hi
[11:50] Todd404: hello
[11:50] west_minstergirl_4_real: ding
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: hi how r u doing?
[11:51] Todd404: I’m exceptional
[11:51] Todd404: how are you?
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: great
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: am fidelia
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: 29
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: from illinois
[11:51] west_minstergirl_4_real: u?
[11:52] Todd404: am Morton
[11:52] Todd404: 35
[11:52] Todd404: from Nigeria
[11:52] Todd404: how are things in illinois?
[11:53] Todd404: Fidelia? You still there?
[11:53] Todd404:
[11:54] Todd404: hello?
[11:57] Todd404: hello?

All you gotta say is you’re from Nigeria, and the chatterboxes clam right up!