Have you received any of those Nigerian scam e-mails, where they offer you 20% of the cut if you support their totally legal transfer of $3 Million (or whatever amount) through your US-based account? Sometimes I want to try it out just to see who the dud is at the other end. Maybe he’s from the Nigerian part of town, and once I find him I can go smack him upside the head. Or better yet, maybe he’s the dude with the Dell sitting two chairs over here at Borders today. Yeah…as if.
Anywho, my point: one thing about these types of scams is that there is a consistent misuse of English, presumably because Dr. Blah-Blah is, of course, a non-native English speaker. And after all, he’s in a hurry, what with the $3 Million about to be confiscated if it’s not legally claimed in the next few nano-seconds.
What made me think about this is a related issue – the poor quality of the spam comments I receive on this blog. Every day I log in and see about 2 – 10 comments in the spam filter. 95% or more of these are easy for me to spot as spam, Â since the grammar is so bad and the even the link is an obvious fake address.
It makes me wonder, what is stopping these folks from sending some semi-moral college freshman $50 to clean up their e-mails? Don’t tell me you wouldn’t take the $50 to spend 3 minutes polishing up their scam letter. You know you would.
Then it clicked.
How do they get the other 5% (estimated) through our human spam filters?
Maybe they’re letting those other 95%ish be crap on purpose so we get used to spam being spammy, and we drop our guard on the other 5%.
OMG! Are we being trained to think that well written e-mails (and blog comments) are worth our time, just because the grammar is good? Think about it.
As we network more, meet people through FaceBook, LinkedIn and other on-line sources it becomes harder for our brains to keep a mental rolodex. Is Brian88@stupiddude.com my cousin’s new e-mail address? Is this link he sent me valid, since it is him. Or, was his e-mail BrianC@regulardude.net?
I’ll just have to hope his grammar is good enough, so I’ll know he’s okay…