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Yesterday a scammer DMed me out of the blue on [popular website], and I replied. (after getting hundreds of similar dms, was curious). He was advertising an options trading site. The writing and english was uniformly bad, like "I got Trading" "am one of workers of company" "You can withdrawal all of your profits."
I've heard "it's bad english and unconvincing to select for dumb people" many times. But after 10 minutes of dming him a bunch of non-culture-war but offensive rdrama-tier bait, he kept replying with, alternately, mild offense and more promotion for options in broken english. For another 10 minutes I diplomatically asked him to explain the scam, or just his work situation as a spammer, and just got "am NOT" "You have to stop this and tell me if you are willing to invest". For the last ten minutes, I explained to him the 'bad english to root out smart people' theory and asked why he continued to engage given I don't match the scam recipient profile, and at the end of that he finally said "Ok bye." But then I asked him "soo can i have a link to the (totally not a scam) options site though hehe" and got "Thank you you believe it nota scam" in return. I then asked what his native language was, chatted with him in russian using google translate for a few minutes, and then gave up (he was still replying). From some longer messages, his words per minute was noticeable slow - around 30 (although according to google that's the average typing speed in the US). He never ended up sending me the URL.
This isn't really explained by 'poor grammar to root out sophisticated people theory', as the scammer didn't stop talking despite clear trolling & awareness of the scam.
My guess is 'selecting for good marks' theory is overemphasized - it's plausible it's true sometimes, although I'd like to see an actual scammer (i'm sure there are scam forums) claiming they do that, but I'm pretty sure a majority of cases are just genuine bad english, median-or-below intelligence, and poor incentive alignment between the poor call center worker and whoever benefits directly from the scam.
[/tangent]
Someone running ten thousand reddit bot accounts will probably be more sophisticated than a phone scammer, and the sophistication necessary to use gpt-n will drop as years pass. It'll be a while before they can reliably trick most people, but something as simple as 'having a plausible post history in /r/jelqing' is not that hard. Even a non-AI purely repost bot can do that - just copy 2 year old posts and comments to /r/jelqing, delete the ones that get downvoted for not making sense in context, and then when they're aged make a post on /r/borrow asking for $50 for groceries because work is stiffing me on my paycheck!
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