The other day, my friend told me about the latest online scam tactic. In this tactic, the scammer poses as a police/CBI/Narcotics official and grills their victim for hours. Eventually, their victim pays some heavy amount of money and gets scammed.
But this one never gets old:
That’s one of the famous versions of the Nigerian Prince Scam.
If you’re anything like me, and read all the versions of the Nigerian Prince Scam, you will laugh until your cheeks hurt.
I mean why would people believe in such types of emails?
They shouldn’t. But still, thousands of people believe such emails/calls every day.
But why not you or me?
Are we special?
If you laughed after reading the Nigerian prince’s email, we know something for sure:
You’re not the scammer’s ideal audience (victim).
Because:
- You’re not foolish to believe in such emails
- You know online scams are real
- You’re digitally literate
- You noticed something fishy
- You noticed that the email has a couple of typos
- You’re not greedy
- You don’t believe in get-rich-quick schemes
Meanwhile, the Nigerian Prince…🤣 |
Still, as we know, every day thousands of people get scammed by Nigerian Prince tactic.
That means the scammer’s ideal audience would:
- Be naive and overly trusting
- Have little or no idea of online scams
- Be digitally inexperienced
- Be off-the guard
- Be too distracted to notice the typos and awkward phrasing
- Be financially in trouble or naturally greedy
- Believe in get-rich-quick schemes
That’s called audience persona
The Nigerian Prince scammers have an ideal type of audience in their minds. And we just outlined their audience’s characterization. That’s called audience persona.
In this case, we can call it their victim’s persona.
Now, I’m not going to say that all of us are like the Nigerian Prince in our work.
But we certainly need to create some audience persona in our work.
Let’s take an example.
If you’re creating an online survey, you’d want to know a few things to make your survey as smooth as possible.
You’d want to understand your user’s persona.
For example:
- Do they understand English?
- Are they comfortable operating a smartphone?
- Is there good internet connectivity?
- When are they free to fill in your survey?
- What is their reading level?
List and Template
There are several types of persona depending on your needs.
Here, I’m sharing a looong list of parameters along with a filled template.
You don’t need to use all the parameters, ideally 15-20 would work for most use cases.
Click on the images below to access and copy the Google Docs.
So, have you ever received any Nigerian Prince’s email?
What was your first reaction?
Hit Reply and share it with me.
Don’t worry, I answer all the emails because there are not that many emails to answer.😄
Reads of the week:
For this week, I had so many things to share.
But this one takes the cake.
What a script! What a performance! This man and the writers were TikTok before TikTok.