To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize detectability.
The biggest take away from this is that I realized that social interactions have formulas and you can take advantage of those formulas. You can also find shortcuts to the formula or make certain parts of the formula more important or less important based on context.
This is a text book usage of social engineer. Putting in divorced parents, single child getting all the attention from the engineer dad making the kid an above average amongst his/her peers, and then putting in a girl, so to make you focus less on the flaws in the story and drool over the hot-geek image more... evergreen combination.
I would doubt though that Forbes came up with this on their own. Rather, it could very much be someone from anon, just having little more fun.
I would expect that the journalist as a filter makes this even more likely. The journalist would then ignore irregularities or dull them in the story presenting the most consistent pieces in the story, not the least.
I would say one advantage that I had, is I could test responses, over and over again. But that is always what allowed me to basically have a formula that would result in 95%+ conversion on the phishing attacks. The other 5% often times where do gooders trying to tell me not to be in chat rooms or to warn me about pedos.
I particularly liked your comment about finding formulas for social interactions. Have you tried looking for work at a social startup? From what I have heard of Facebook's culture, you would fit right in.
I think the link is just http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/transactional_analysis if that's wrong I apologize, I'm typing this from my phone
