Lack of stats

By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics and access other forums reserved for members. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today by clicking here.

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:49 pm

With the lack of statistics on how many people hand over their hard earned. With all those on this forum and others. With all those (like me previously) who are baiting alone, and not knowing there are others. How can we ever know the big picture?

With your knowledge, what would you estimate the success rate of scammers to be?

Personally I think some make money regularly, most make nothing, but are still doing the lottery.

Over to you.

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:50 pm

All i see is rough estimates - the FBI/USSS seems to have it in the hundreds of millions

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:51 pm

It's virtually impossible to really tell. Even those who know they've been scammed often do not report it for fear of ridicule.

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:54 pm

Lester, do you have any links to that please?

Of course we will never know the true stats for that reason Rodus Sad

Just a thought...

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:06 pm

Stats: http://www.ultrascan.nl/html/victims.html

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:16 pm

Good God! That link needs to be made a sticky!

Baiting Guru Joined: 08 Jul 2004 Posts: 11857 Location: UK

^^^^^ Don't pay much attention to that link, UltraSCAM are scum, to my mind, they are no better than scammers, why? Because they offer a money recovery service to victims, they charge victims thousands, and we all know what hope a victim has of recovering their money, almost zero, and how much money have UltraSCAM recovered for victims who have paid them? Not a god damn penny, that's how much according to their site the last time I bothered to look at it, their stats are probably a load of old bollox as well.

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:45 pm

I was amazed to read this off the Northants UK Police site

Quote:

Research of the UK victims who lost money last year as a result of 419 correspondence shows that the average loss was �68,000, down from the �146,000 previously which is deemed to be indicative that victims are reporting the loss at an earlier stage in their crime.

�68,000 !!! Shocked

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:46 pm

Blimey both!

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 12:17 am

I'm with that Nigerian guy who said he couldnt believe anyone actually replies to these mails...

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 1:48 am

http://www.phonebusters.com/english/statistics.html

click year end stats

on the second pages there are stats for 419 and west african fraud

Baiting Guru Joined: 17 Sep 2006 Posts: 5905

Poison Ivy wrote:

Personally I think some make money regularly, most make nothing, but are still doing the lottery.

The truth is such are the state of things in places like Lagos that one success a year for scammers will be enough to enourage them to carry on. What we may consider in the western world to be next to nothing can be a tidy sum of money for people living in developing nations.

As the ABC programme on scammers revealed the average wage in Lagos is $1 a week. Say your honest Nigerian works 50 weeks a year he will earn $50 per annum. Say a scammer who wasn't very good gets one victim a year and only gets them to pay out the initial fee which is from my experience about $2,000. From this one scam the Nigerian scammer has made as much money for about 1 weeks work (if you can call sending cut & paste emails work) than your average honest Nigerian would make working his butt off for 40 years.

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 10:03 pm

About all we really know is that the scam is successful enough to where it seems there are legions of lads sending out these emails.

You would think that market saturation could be reached, but PT Barnum said there's a sucker born every minute and as long as that's happening we'll have lads and we'll also have victims.

Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2007 6:10 am

The success rate is very high amongst the fake check scammers, lottery lads and love scammers. Then there's the phishing scams, stolen credit cards etc. It's a huge "industry"

It's tough to get an actual number as many victims do not reveal all they've lost. Each country would keep their own stats on this.

Here's something from Australia:

Quote:

An estimated US$ 500,000 per month moves out of Queensland alone. Last year, this kind of loss from the state of Queensland was $300,000. The amount is growing year on year, said detective and acting superintendent Brian Hay of the Queensland Police Service, as published by PC World on May 23, 2007.

Brian Hay has talked to above 130 victims who collectively lost $18 Million from such frauds. Unbelievably, these victims don't want to prosecute. In fact, according to Hay, almost 75% still send the defrauders money despite being told such kinds of frauds have victimized them.

http://tinyurl.com/2spaf2

Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2007 6:55 am

If we use these Queensland figures which work out at $1.44 per year per head of population and then extrapolate them to say the combined population of the USA, Britain, Canada and Australia (361 million) then we have a total of around $520 million as the world wide take from scams. I know that I haven�t counted a whole heap of countries but these will do as I intend to be on the conservative side.

The Wikipedia entry for 419 scams gives a figure of 250,000 as the number of scammers. If we accept this as a reasonably accurate figure then the average take per scammer is around $2,100 per year.

I accept that these numbers are a fairly shaky but probably give an idea of how lucrative scams are. As already pointed out wages in West Africa are very low and this would be a better than average income.

Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2007 9:43 am

The facts support a figure of about $US1 per person per year in the Western Anglophone world. As a Queenslander myself, I can attest to the fact that we're dumber but less affluent, so we're about normal when it comes to losing money.

Of course, there is no 'average' income for scammers. Scamming is organised crime as well as disorganised crime, the structure is pyramidal. Some high-level scammers have made millions out of this. Some hapless fools travel thousands of miles, actually losing money. That's why we bait.

Probably, the average Internet cafe Lad makes a subsistence income, but all of them are dreaming of the Big Score, and that's why they'll never quit, as long as there are gullible victims out there. Sad

Master Baiter Joined: 26 Mar 2007 Posts: 149

"Water finds its own level. Appently money does as well."

- Grandfather Chipmunk