419eater is also full of scammers whose English notably deteriorates, scammers who have almost endless time to comply with bonkers requests, and scammers that are quite far into the discussion when they go to some effort to produce "official documents" that look like they were produced by a child. And personally, I've experienced the reverse, where even when it's a well constructed item-for-sale scam by someone with access to a PayPal account they can't help but use email addresses that look a bit too Nigerian to be an elderly Scottish lady and English that just doesn't match the ad copy and is obsessed with explaining the safety and urgency of the transaction rather than the "product". Most of the others have to mention Western Union to Nigeria at some point...
Just doesn't make much sense for people whose time is valued in cents per hour and whose theoretical earnings are in the thousands to optimise for screening out non-gullible people, plus the 99.9% of gullible people that have some sort of spam filter in the loop. But hey, if someone's shared that Microsoft Research paper with the scammers and they've come to believe that using formats that almost invariably bump into spam filters is actually a shrewd move on their part, who am I to discourage them?!
I don't know about Boko Haram involvement, but I assume the organized crime guys have some sort of MLM-style operation scamming Nigerians into paying for the get-rich-quick opportunity.
