Maybe it’s like the apocryphal rumour that spelling mistakes in scam emails are really a filter to get rid of a large chunk of people who wouldn’t fall for the scam anyway.
The author speculates this as well in the article:
> Maybe this strategy is similar to how the Nigerian scammers work: put some obvious errors in the text, anybody that misses those is probably well worth the time invested and those that cancel early would have cancelled anyway, an optimization strategy.
Does that make sense from a behavioral-economic perspective? What is the scammer’s incentive to filter certain people out? Wouldn’t it be better to move more people down the “funnel” and filter potential troublemakers as they appear?
Generally in a sales process, the further down the funnel you get (as a prospect) the more of your counterparty's time you'll be consuming. A mass-email might trigger a call, for example.
I think the idea is that the scammers might be pre-qualifying their prospects for gullibility before committing further time to closing the sale.
Via the book Think Like A Freak which I’d guess extrapolates from it. But it seems like one of those ideas that has gone from plausible explanation to fact in popular imagination.
The more invested someone gets, the more likely they are to kick up a fuss when they decide it's a scam. If you were pitching this deck, you don't want prominent, angry VCs posting publicly on Twitter about how it's a scam.
If you weed them out right at the beginning, exposure doesn't happen as quickly.
Moving down the funnel means increasing time investment for the scammers, too. Better to spend those hours on someone gullible.
