Airborne_Again wrote:
I’ve seen speculation that this is done on purpose, simply too weed out people who won’t be fooled in the end.
Theoretically, it could be the case, but given the abundance of these e-mails, I’d say it’s much more likely to be due to mere stupidity of the scammer. I also happen to know someone whose pastime is to correspond with African dating and inheritance scammers trying to outdupe them; according to him, they aren’t put off by such obvious fakes as passports issued by a nonexistent country.
huv wrote:
Not much to be gained from that, is there?
I actually think there is. The fraudsters have to spend some time on every “phish” so they want the least amount of “escape” once someone is on the hook.
It’s what salesmen call “qualifying leads” 
Airborne_Again wrote:
too weed out people who won’t be fooled in the end.
Not much to be gained from that, is there?
Timothy wrote:
But what is special about these fraudsters that they leave such obvious fingerprints ,like putting a space before a comma but not after ,or neither,capitalise the Wrong letters ,fail to start new sentences with capitals etc?I’ve seen speculation that this is done on purpose, simply too weed out people who won’t be fooled in the end.
We get this at work almost weekly. Usually a bit slicker than this, but the patterns of products being ordered give it away (would fool the normal sales office staff though).
Peter,
I can just see you thinking “oh, why are we always prejudiced into thinking it must be a Nigerian?” then doing the whois and thinking “ah, right.” :-D
You aren’t wrong about Nigeria… a whois on eurocontrolint.net yields
But evidently it works to some degree.
But what is special about these fraudsters that they leave such obvious fingerprints ,like putting a space before a comma but not after ,or neither,capitalise the Wrong letters ,fail to start new sentences with capitals etc?
Surely there must be someone in Nigeria with a basic grasp of written grammar and punctuation who could proof read these emails? It would make them much harder to spot.
The newest variant – they are getting better 
