Why Scammers Don’t Want Everyone To Believe Them

Scam emails are stupid.

Not slightly stupid.

Impressively stupid.

Some prince has $18 million stuck somewhere.

His father died.

The government is after him.

His lawyer disappeared.

And after considering every banker, accountant and international law firm available on earth, he has decided that you are the perfect person to help move the money.

You.

Checking Gmail at 2 AM.

Beautiful.

Most people read that and immediately think:

Scam.

Delete.

Which sounds like terrible marketing.

Except it might be doing exactly what it needs to do.

Because the scammer does not need everyone to believe him.

He needs to find the person who reads all of that…

and still replies.

And unfortunately, that is a very good lesson in targeting.

Not ethics.

Please.

The targeting.

The Bad Message Might Be The Filter

Talking to people costs scammers time too.

If the message is polished, believable and professionally written, more people may reply.

Sounds good.

Except now the scammer has a new problem.

Too many people.

Too many skeptical people.

Too many people who will ask questions, waste time, maybe even stay in the conversation for a while…

and then realise:

Yeah. Scam.

Great.

A huge pipeline full of people who will never pay.

So the absurdity does something useful.

It repels.

Most people leave quickly.

Someone reads:

DEAREST SIR I AM THE SON OF FORMER MINISTER AND HAVE $24 MILLION…

and thinks:

Absolutely not.

Good.

Gone.

Then someone replies:

Dear Sir, how can I help?

Now the scammer has learned something.

That reply itself is information.

The message did not just attract.

It filtered.

That is a very different job.

The Offer Is Filtering Desire Too

And I think there is another layer people miss.

The scammer is not only filtering for someone who believes the story.

They are filtering for someone who wants the story to be true badly enough.

Think about the offer.

Help a stranger move $20 million.

Get a huge cut.

Minimal work.

Massive upside.

No particularly good reason this opportunity should exist.

And still…

someone continues.

That tells you something.

Not:

this person is stupid.

That is too easy.

More interestingly:

this person is attracted to unusually high reward with unusually low effort.

Fast money.

Huge upside.

A shortcut.

A story where they somehow got selected for an opportunity most people never get.

That is psychology.

And that is positioning.

The offer is selecting for a particular desire.

Which is exactly what products do too.

A product promising:

Double your revenue in 30 days.

attracts a very different buyer from one promising:

Build a boring sales system that compounds over 18 months.

Same broad category.

Completely different customer.

Different patience.

Different risk tolerance.

Different expectations.

Different psychology.

The message itself is sorting the market.

Most Businesses Want Too Many Leads

This sounds ridiculous because every business wants customers.

Obviously.

But customers and leads are not the same thing.

Imagine I run an agency.

Marketing generates 1,000 leads.

Fantastic.

Beautiful dashboard.

Big number.

Except:

800 cannot afford us.

100 want something we don’t sell.

50 want free advice.

30 ask for pricing and vanish.

15 are “discussing internally,” which is corporate language for please stop following up.

5 can actually buy.

So did I generate 1,000 leads?

Technically.

Practically?

I generated 995 conversations I probably didn’t need.

And somebody has to handle them.

Reply.

Qualify.

Book calls.

Send proposals.

Follow up.

Listen to:

“We absolutely love your work. Our budget is ₹8,000.”

Amazing.

More leads can be better.

But only when the leads resemble customers.

Otherwise you’re just scaling admin.

The Wrong Person Clicking Is Not Always A Win

Marketing dashboards have trained us to celebrate movement.

More impressions.

Good.

More clicks.

Good.

More DMs.

Good.

More calls.

Excellent.

Green arrow.

Everybody clap.

But the business doesn’t make money because someone clicked Learn More.

The interesting question happens after that.

Take two campaigns.

Campaign A:

1,000 leads.

10 customers.

Campaign B:

200 leads.

20 customers.

Which one performed better?

Campaign A gives you the better screenshot.

Campaign B gives you twice the customers.

Personally, I enjoy money.

So I know which metric I care about.

This is where I think a lot of marketing goes slightly wrong.

We obsess over getting more people into the funnel.

Sometimes the bigger problem is that the wrong people were entering the funnel in the first place.

Your Marketing Should Probably Make Someone Leave

This feels wrong.

Marketing is supposed to attract people.

Yes.

But good positioning should also make some people realise:

Not for me.

If your service costs ₹2 lakh a month, tell people.

Will fewer people contact you?

Hopefully.

Someone with a ₹20,000 budget does not need to spend 45 minutes discovering that on Zoom.

You saved their time.

You saved yours.

If your software only makes sense for companies with 50 employees, say it.

If you only edit content for people publishing 100 videos a month, say it.

If your product requires technical setup, say it.

You do not need everybody reading your page and thinking:

Maybe I could use this.

You need the right person thinking:

Wait. This is literally for me.

That difference is positioning.

Broad Marketing Is Usually Fear Wearing A Nice Shirt

Businesses hate narrowing.

What if someone outside the niche would have bought?

What if the audience becomes too small?

What if we lose an opportunity?

Fair.

So they broaden.

Then broaden again.

And again.

Until the website says:

We help businesses unlock growth through innovative solutions.

Fantastic.

You have successfully said absolutely nothing.

Nobody feels excluded.

Nobody feels understood either.

Specificity always makes the audience smaller.

That is the point.

Compare:

Inventory software for businesses.

with:

Inventory software for independent pharmacies managing multiple locations.

The second one has a dramatically smaller audience.

Good.

Because the pharmacist with four stores might read it and think:

Oh. They understand my exact problem.

Everyone else can leave.

They were never the customer.

The Wrong Customer Can Cost More After They Buy

This is where bad targeting becomes genuinely expensive.

A bad lead who doesn’t buy wastes sales time.

Fine.

A bad-fit customer who does buy can become much worse.

They need exceptions.

They need features you don’t have.

They require support your business wasn’t designed for.

They complain about something your good customers actually like.

Then someone internally says:

“We’re getting a lot of demand for this.”

From whom?

Four customers we probably should never have acquired.

Now the product changes.

Operations get more complicated.

Support gets heavier.

Your core customer gets a worse experience.

And everybody celebrates because:

we increased customer count.

Not every customer improves the business.

Some just increase the number.

Price Is Targeting Too

People treat price like something finance decides after marketing finishes.

It isn’t that clean.

Price also filters.

₹499 attracts one customer.

₹4,999 attracts another.

₹49,999 attracts another.

Different expectations.

Different problems.

Different urgency.

Different support requirements.

Different reasons for buying.

This does not mean you can add a zero to your price tomorrow and suddenly become luxury.

Please don’t call me next week saying:

“Harsh, revenue is now zero but the positioning feels premium.”

The product has to support the price.

But price tells people something.

Who is this for?

What level of commitment is expected?

How painful does this problem need to be before the price makes sense?

Again:

targeting.

“Find Your Niche” Is Usually Explained Terribly

The internet explains niches like you’re choosing a Netflix category.

Fitness.

Finance.

Marketing.

Pets.

AI.

Congratulations.

You have selected a noun.

That is not enough.

A useful niche is closer to:

Which specific group has which specific problem badly enough to pay someone to fix it?

An agency helping restaurants get local foot traffic and an agency helping B2B SaaS companies book enterprise demos are both “marketing agencies.”

That description tells you almost nothing.

Different customer.

Different problem.

Different budget.

Different proof.

Different sales cycle.

Different acquisition.

Different everything.

Your niche is not just the topic.

It is the customer and the economics around them.

Good Positioning Should Feel Slightly Uncomfortable

I think this is probably the test.

The wrong person should look at your offer and think:

Not for me.

The right person should think:

How the hell do they know this is my problem?

That second reaction is worth much more than:

Nice website.

Marketing isn’t an interior-design competition.

You don’t get paid because everyone agrees the landing page looks professional.

You get paid when the right person believes you understand something they need solved.

Sometimes Less Reach Is Better Marketing

This is almost offensive to the internet.

Everything wants more.

More views.

More followers.

More clicks.

More traffic.

More leads.

Obviously reach matters.

I literally run media businesses. I’m not going to pretend attention has no value.

But attention without relevance is just a big number.

If Coca-Cola reaches 20 million people?

Great.

If you sell ₹40 lakh industrial machinery to pharmaceutical manufacturers and your Reel gets 5 million teenagers watching it?

Also great.

For Instagram.

Not necessarily for you.

Sometimes the smaller audience is more valuable because the smaller audience contains the buyer.

And No, Please Don’t Start Writing Like A Scammer

This should probably be obvious.

Do not deliberately use broken English.

Do not make your website suspicious.

Do not send:

DEAREST CEO I HAVE 17 MILLION CUSTOMERS FOR YOUR BUSINESS.

The lesson is not that bad communication is genius.

And not every typo in every scam email is some carefully designed mastermind strategy.

Sometimes bad English is simply bad English.

The interesting lesson is narrower:

a message can become more profitable by making the wrong people leave early.

Take the filtering.

Leave the crime.

Preferably.

This Isn’t Just Me Making A Cute Marketing Comparison

There is actual research behind this.

In 2012, Microsoft Research published a paper by Cormac Herley called “Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are From Nigeria?”

The paper looked at essentially this exact problem.

Scammers have false positives too.

A false positive, from the attacker’s perspective, is someone who looks promising enough to pursue but ultimately produces nothing.

That matters because every conversation costs time and effort.

The paper’s argument was that when viable victims are extremely rare, the attacker has a huge incentive to repel non-viable people early. Far-fetched stories can actually help because they make most people leave immediately, while the small group more likely to fall for the scam effectively self-selects.

Which is an unbelievably dark way of saying:

qualification matters.

Microsoft’s paper even notes that making the message less ridiculous could produce more total responses while still making the scam less profitable, because the scammer would have to spend more time sorting through people who were never going to pay.

That is the part I find fascinating.

More replies.

Worse economics.

Sounds familiar.

I think businesses spend too much time asking:

How do we convince more people?

And not enough time asking:

Which people should we stop trying to convince?

Persuasion asks:

How do I make this person buy?

Targeting asks:

Should this person even be here?

Very different question.

The scammer does not need everyone to believe the story.

He needs the wrong people to leave quickly enough that the right victim becomes obvious.

A legitimate business obviously needs a much less horrible version of that.

But the principle survives.

You do not need everybody to click.

You do not need everybody to call.

You do not need everybody to like the offer.

And sometimes your marketing problem isn’t that too few people are interested.

Maybe too many wrong people are.