Doing data protection training and it says ‘Many hackers misspell words… on purpose.’
I’m glad this makes scams easier to spot but it just doesn’t seem to make sense to me as a useful tactic at all.
Edit: typo correction- hackers not jackets!
In: 592
They have more email addresses than they can use by several orders of magnitude. The goal is to narrow the scam down to stupid people, who are better targets.
I was just puzzling over this earlier. Mixed fonts, emojis, poor spelling. Like, how does *anyone* fall for these things?
The typos were probably initially meant to allow them to bypass spam filter that used word scans.
Also a lot of spam is from non English speaking countries. Have you ever seen the hot mess that is google translate?
People who pick up on the bad grammar and respond that way are not their intended target.
They want the gullible and the not-so-critcally-disposed.
LifeProTip: anyone you don’t know who reaches out to you across the void who says they’re going to make you rich: it is a scam -always-.
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I’ve heard a theory that it is kind of like a filter, insuring only the most easily fooled people will reply to your emails. this way they’re not wasting as much time with people who realise it’s a scam halfway through.
“Only the dumbest people fall for scams.”
“You have to be really stupid to fall for that.”
“What desperate idiot would fall for that?!”
All ignorantly accurate statements I have heard simultaneously question and describe why the ads are so clearly bad. When you are going for easy money, why make it hard on yourself? Weed out anyone with half a clue as your introduction, and all you are left with are… less well read people. It sucks, but this is part of why reading comprehension does matter.
Now, there are scams that put more effort out. Barely though. It’s more like they invest in better forgeries- websites that look accurate, emails that seem accurate or phone calls with local numbers come to mind. But there is always something *fishy* if you take the time to analyze *a website you visit so regularly you absent mindedly sign in multiple times daily*. Who does that? Slightly more well read people, with time, but not most of us.
Eventually, a real exchange of your information has to happen that draws red flags for most people, even in the well designed scams.
Hackers are not the same as scammers. Scammers attempt to get YOU to do something on their behalf. Hackers generally are not involving you outside of gaining access.
Hackers misspell words because they are attempting to guess passwords for average people who DO misspell words. Like a password FarmBoi vs FarmBoy or BoneAppleTea.
Or, as others have pointed out, when bypassing security features that typically send certain words to spam or that security features flag. They might use zero instead of “O”
Hackers *can* pose as scammers; scammers are generally not hackers. Hacking takes significant information retention and regurgitation. Scam centers are entry level jobs often posted as legit jobs working from real companies backrooms and individual scammers tend to use the same customer service error/refund/theft model. We could dive into pyramid schemes, designed to fail products and other deeper scams posing openly as businesses, but I think this has gone on long enough.
; )
Sending spam that reaches users’ inboxes is extremely inexpensive. It’s not as cheap as sending legitimate email, because mail server operators around the world try to block your messages, but the cost of reaching a reasonable number of people is still very cheap. But what is even more important is how much less expensive it is when compared to operating a call center.
Consider for a moment what would be required if the emails were perfect replicas of legitimate emails. The volume of calls coming in to their call centers would increase by 10 or maybe 100 times. The problem is that the vast majority of the people calling would be reasonably intelligent people who are capable of identifying that something is “off” once they start talking to the call center.
So by making the email imperfect, they create a kind of screening filter that only captures individuals who aren’t able to discern that something is “off”. If they receive the poorly constructed email, but they *still* call the number, then they *must* be incapable of identifying the scam. This is exactly the person that the scammers want to talk to. They don’t even want to talk to the more competent targets, because they’ll just waste valuable call center time.
Easy: you don’t want to waste time on a mark that will realize what the scam is partway through the process and abort. Thus, when phishing, you ideally want to select only the dumbest people you can find.
They do this by making the scam pretty obvious in the initial phase. Anybody who can’t see through their opener is probably an exceptional rube they can extract money from as long as the rest of the scheme is halfway competent.
Basically to weed out people with critical thinking skills. Won’t be able to scam them as easily.
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