Does anyone know the success rate of Benin lads vs others?

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Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2017 11:57 pm

It seems to me that Benin lads would not be as successful as lads from Nigeria, Ghana, etc. Most of what I see in my catcher from Benin lads boils down to "I'm giving you millions of dollars for no reason at all", they usually ask for payment in the very first email, and they struggle to answer questions.

Benin lads are quicker to drop baiters, it seems, even when the questions are perfectly reasonable (e.g. why is a bank I have never heard of sending me an ATM card with millions of dollars on it, and why is shipping so expensive?), so it stands to reason that they'd be quicker to drop potential victims as well for even being slightly suspicious.

Of course, it's entirely possible that I am totally off base here, and it's very unlikely that any sort of meaningful data exists for this sort of thing (mostly because lads lie and victims are often too scared or embarrassed to report what happened).

Elite Baiter Joined: 17 Jun 2015 Posts: 1738

From my experience Benin lads are only asking for small fees* so people may go it's only $50 (if it's a scam I haven't lost much) and pay the money-enough of them do that and a lad has a decent income.

I would also imagine that Benin is cheaper to live in than Ghana and Nigeria, so a lad earning $500 in Benin may be the equivalent of a Lagos lad earning $2000

*Of course that leaves a victim open for more requests for money and recovery scams.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2017 1:06 am

I think it's a mass marketing type format. Send thousands of emails out asking for a small amount of money expecting hits on maybe 1 or 2 percent of them. If a hit comes in, the mass mailer gets a piece and the "lead" gets sent to a lad higher up the chain. That's where the action happens.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2017 6:18 am

My personal opinion:

In Benin, French is spoken (it is a former French colony), so all the lads use pre-format scripts and so on. Just few of them do well in English, so the major strategy is "asking for the money and waiting to see what's going on."

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2017 7:08 am

^That sounds sensible. How often do Benin lads send out scripts in French?

I baited a gold lad in Côte d'Ivoire and switched to French partway through.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2017 8:08 am

Not so often.
Most scripts are in English (I think they receive and retrieve them "as they are"). If you manage to get them out of script, their words show that the majority of lads do not speak English fluently.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2017 8:28 am

One possibility is they are just shooting out way more English formats than French because English is more widely spoken worldwide.

We may also just be overlooking French formats, the vast majority of baiters here do not seem to be part of the francophone world and may simply not notice / not be targeted by French formats.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2017 8:39 am

My catcher account receives the occasional french script, but I have noticed these are less frequent than french phishing emails. Nevertheless, getting anything in french is a novelty.

Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2017 5:43 pm

Birlic wrote:

My personal opinion:

In Benin, French is spoken (it is a former French colony), so all the lads use pre-format scripts and so on. Just few of them do well in English, so the major strategy is "asking for the money and waiting to see what's going on."

I would go so far as to say that this is fact, not opinion. Benin lads almost never speak English fluently. They'd never really have any reason to do so - I'm guessing that the most common language there would be sort of like French creole, like Haitians speak, though not exactly the same - essentially simplified French mixed with indigenous languages. The better educated people in Benin probably know proper French, and I'm assuming that French is used in the government, in court, on official correspondence from businesses, et cetera. Then, there is Nigerian Pidgin, which seems to be used universally throughout West Africa.

Then, finally, if they know a fourth language, it's probably English.

A French speaker would have a huge advantage when it comes to baiting Benin lads and getting things like safaris and tattoos from them, as it's very difficult to get the point across to them in English (since they don't really speak it).

Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2017 6:30 pm

Speaking French also helps when a lad from another country is on safari in Benin. On my safari, I and TM both explained in French to the taxi driver that he needed to take the gold lad to Allada.

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