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The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

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Re: The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

#91

Post by rdsubhas »

hanoz wrote: post #51

This is bollocks. Speaking for Britain, and I think I can, there are hoards of would be victims to this kind of scam, particular of the current retirees generation, who are extremely vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes about technical and internet security best practice matters, but for whom just so much as a poor turn of phrase or some unusually laid out punctuation is an absolute dead giveaway. If…

Both can be true.

Educated, British retiree is one class of audience, who may need a different nuanced tactic (tech/ amazon/ gmail security like email with a professional English call center that can engage them).

The world is a big place. There are also other classes of audiences (where the engagement effort is much lower) and this purposeful spelling mistake does look like a good way to weed out some of them.

Re: The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

#92

Post by aaron695 »

hanoz wrote: post #51

This is bollocks. Speaking for Britain, and I think I can, there are hoards of would be victims to this kind of scam, particular of the current retirees generation, who are extremely vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes about technical and internet security best practice matters, but for whom just so much as a poor turn of phrase or some unusually laid out punctuation is an absolute dead giveaway. If…

No post body was provided.

Re: The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

#93

Post by notahacker »

edwcross wrote: post #83
mikhmha wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. This article is a popular “Reddit” theory I’ve seen float around for a while now and it’s just not true! I’ve worked IT help desk before and have seen lots of phishing emails. If scammers tightened up their spelling and grammar skills a tiny bit they would catch many more victims effortlessly. The bar is insanely low. Most users could spot obvious phishing emails. But emails with even just a little more effort…

The theory I heard worked in the other direction: if we assume scammers have a finite amount of time, it could be in their interest to minimize the amount of "likely good targets" in order to increase the amount of " very likely good targets". So all those untapped potential targets are just too similar to non-good targets for them to discriminate effectively, leaving them so far focused on the lower-hanging fruit. I…

If we assume that scammers live in the developing world, their time is almost certainly not valued so highly that having a few more responses to copy/paste a unanswered requests for payment to is worth their bulk email losing a single wealthy Westerner that's trusting and unworldly but also a stickler for good grammar (or has a spam filter that knows a lot more about Nigerian princes than they do). I've seen in-person scammers in the developing world continue to waste their own time trying to reel me in even after I've told them I'm familiar with that type of scam and failed to turn up for suggested meetups, and it's not like I was the only white person in Jaipur...

There are often horrible spelling and grammar and composition errors leading to phishing pages which involve zero further input on the spammer's part to collect valuable data too.

Re: The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

#94

Post by otikik »

hanoz wrote: post #51

This is bollocks. Speaking for Britain, and I think I can, there are hoards of would be victims to this kind of scam, particular of the current retirees generation, who are extremely vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes about technical and internet security best practice matters, but for whom just so much as a poor turn of phrase or some unusually laid out punctuation is an absolute dead giveaway. If…

I agree in that the collective that you mention exists, and it is probably the majority. They are not the target.

Remember that scammers are lazy. The target is someone who doesn’t notice the punctuation problems. People with mental illnesses, etc, but with access to funds. It might very well be much smaller than the group you mention but they are easier to scam. No need to use technical trickery. They will give you their credit card details over the phone.

Re: The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

#96

Post by nottorp »

NearAP wrote: post #54
anon_cow1111 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true but also... In my experience[1] a large majority of facebook-level romance scammers use the same copypasta messages when possible, because they actually are from (e.g.)Nigeria and really do have poor English. This is especially relevant to your point because facebook could EASILY be flagging people based on known pasta messages, for review or shadowbanning etc. They presumably don't do this because "not…

>> because they actually are from (e.g.)Nigeria and really do have poor English. This isn't true. English is Nigeria's official language (all Education is in English) and people generally speak English well. Secondly, folks from Nigeria actually use the gist of the article as a flag for filtering out scam i.e. once they open an email with bad grammar, they automatically assume it's scam and ignore it.

It's funny how native English speakers assume that:

[a] English, which is being used for communication internationally just about everywhere, is only spoken well in the anglo-saxon areas.

[b] Someone who speaks bad English doesn't realize it just because they're in a poor country.

Re: The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

#97

Post by ab-dm »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #61
mikhmha wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. This article is a popular “Reddit” theory I’ve seen float around for a while now and it’s just not true! I’ve worked IT help desk before and have seen lots of phishing emails. If scammers tightened up their spelling and grammar skills a tiny bit they would catch many more victims effortlessly. The bar is insanely low. Most users could spot obvious phishing emails. But emails with even just a little more effort…

I am another data point that would agree with you on this. I would classify myself as a sophisticated computer user (if I don't say so myself), and I fell for a phishing page once. They recreated a pixel-perfect copy of the Steam login page in a fake browser window with a pretend address bar etc. I entered not only my creds, but also my 2FA code, before realising that it was not legit. Got an email shortly afterwards…

Likewise. It’s scary how easily you can just fall into a phishing trap. I almost gave an attacker my GitHub login due to a (Very very good) phishing email impersonating CircleCI.

The email was really good (not in junk), the domain was close, pixel perfect UI and is just finished a reformat so entering in my feeds again made sense. Unfortunately for them, they sent the email out prematurely because after pressing the button I got a JS error.

Re: The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

#99

Post by majikandy »

hanoz wrote: post #51

This is bollocks. Speaking for Britain, and I think I can, there are hoards of would be victims to this kind of scam, particular of the current retirees generation, who are extremely vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes about technical and internet security best practice matters, but for whom just so much as a poor turn of phrase or some unusually laid out punctuation is an absolute dead giveaway. If…

Is it possible that scamming huge swathes of people would make said sacammer a victim of their own success and a prime target for the authorities?
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