Friday 12th July 2013 - Do email scammers need training?

Just so that people aren't wondering whether I've given up the blog, I should explain that I've just been away for 11 days holiday, and have therefore not been recording my thoughts recently.

Perhaps it's because I work in education that I want to make everything better - even when it's perhaps best left as it is.  I sometimes think we should run courses for e-mail scammers so that they can do a better job.  But then I know that even with the oddities they currently send out they often catch unwary souls who should know better. And it's the errors in what they write that often give the game away.

I've been set to thinking about this by an e-mail I received this morning. It purported to come from a senior colleague elsewhere in higher education, and was a plea for financial help because, so the story went, he was in a foreign country and all his possessions had been stolen - and the hotel manager wouldn't let him go until he had settled his hotel bill.  Even if this had been a plausible story it was immediately obvious that the mail did not come from my colleague (despite hackers having used his address).  For a start there was the reference to 'my cell'.  What older Englishman uses that vocabulary to refer to his mobile phone?  Then there were the lower case renderings of what should have been 'I'.  And then there were mis-spellings.  All of these pointed to a scammer who hadn't got a clue about the style of the person s/he was trying to impersonate.  Why hadn't they tried a little harder?

And then we all get those emails from banks and other financial institutions telling us that we need to provide some extra information because of a systems breakdown.  But the name of the bank contains spelling errors, it is given as 'Inc' instead of 'plc', the grammar is hopeless, and the syntax tells us instantly that this is a message that has not been passed by a corporate communications team. 

So perhaps although I want to root out incompetence anywhere and everywhere, in the area of internet and e-mail scamming a measure of incompetence is useful to us all.