Earlier today, I received an email from a supposedly frantic relative (or maybe “frantic supposed relative”) stating the following:
Hey!
I’m writing this with tears in my eyes,We came down here to London,England for a short vacation and We was mugged at gun point last night at the park of the hotel where we lodged all cash,credit cards and cell were stolen off us.We’ve been to the US embassy and the Police here but they’re not helping issues at all,Our flight leaves in less than 24hrs from now and we are having problems settling the hotel bills.
The hotel manager won’t let us leave until we settle the hotel bills now we freaked out.
We need your help.
Regards.
Not to spoil the punchline, but someone has control of her email account and is fielding responses. It’s probably not a great idea to bug these people, but if I did, here’s what I’d ask them:
What do you mean by “won’t let us leave”? As in, he has you locked in a closet somewhere?
What sort of hotel doesn’t take your credit card number when you check in?
Why do you all the suddenly capitalize after commas?
When you say “down here to London,England”, where were you coming from? Iceland?
I do appreciate the use of a colloquial English phrase. And NOW WE FREAKED OUT!!!
Does NO ONE speak English in Nigeria, China or wherever this came from?
Someone is out there who will help poor, lost relatives, stuck on the mean streets of London,England. Hopefully it’s not anyone on that particular email list.
Words 
[…] as Furstie points out, can’t the Nigerians or Chinese or whoever, like, turn on MTV for an hour or something, just […]
Presumably there is no market pressure for the nigerian scammers and the like to master english — which means a ton of people are successfully being scammed by this “style” of writing.
I wonder what the distribution of successful scams looks like across level of writing and person being scammed…
I wouldnt be surprised if there’s some sort of threshold for “barely believable” which ropes in people who are easily or moderately easily scammed — but then there’d be a HUGE increase in quality of scam required to get the “hard to reach” people that are both good at reading and skeptical of everything.