Stephen Dubner

This is Freakonomics Radio.

We will be right back.

The word scam entered the English language only in the 1950s.

But don't be fooled.

There are many older words in many languages that mean the same thing.

Because as long as there have been people, there has been scammery.

In ancient economies, merchants cheated customers with rigged scales and fake coins.

In religious contexts, there were fake miracle workers and counterfeit relics.

A main ingredient in any scam is desire.

That is Mark Frank.

He teaches communication science at the University at Buffalo.

His PhD is in social psychology, and he specializes in lying and deception.

For someone like him, these are busy times.

Frank says that scamming goes back to even our pre-human ancestors.

Frank has interviewed human scam artists.

He knows how they think and why they are successful.

And that, again, is the gerontologist Marty DeLima.

In case you haven't heard of the Nigerian prince scam, here's how it works.

And why do some scammers make their scams so obvious?

The Microsoft researcher Cormac Hurley suggested one answer to that question in a 2012 paper called Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are From Nigeria?