Scam

Scam, or the Confidence trick refers to the attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence.

Such an activity often includes 1. providing some false information. 2. promise of some benefits to the people who believe this information.

The primitive fraud may use the junk messages distributed through the email or internet portals, forums. promising some benefits to anybody who may be interested. Often such benefits include the intents of transferring of some megadollars to the victim's account. (in the example below, the amount 4.5M\) is mentioned.

Perhaps, such fraud messages are distributed either by robots or by a primitive people without any phantasy; the typical patterns reproduce identically from one message to another. An example of such patterns is provided by the site "bittenus" ; even the misprints are reproduced from one message to another, for example: .. I wish to share with you in confidence that before the incident took place, there was a certain amount of money totaling \)4.5 M US Dollars ( fOUR million five hundred thousand US dollars)...

Similar tests are reported also by other sites /

Such a trolling may be dangerous for users who cannot distinguish robots from humans chatting; the exchange with polite sentences transfers no specific (nontrivial, scientific) information may give an illusion of chatting with a real human. There is no general algorithm to distinguish human from robot .

Dealing with scam
Several practical advices about scam are formulated by M.Young . The safest ways are either to ignore (and delete) the scam message, or to report it to the anti-criminal authorities.

Those brave individuals who dare to deal with criminals may consider to answer the scam message(s), playing some kind of game against robots or even against the real gangsters. (In the last case, the potential victim should reveal no personal information to the scammers).