Subj : Re: Lots of phishing emails "from" Yahoo and Hotmail this week.
To   : All
From : Petecresswell
Date : Sun Jan 01 2017 07:10 pm

From: "(PeteCresswell)" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Lots of phishing emails "from" Yahoo and Hotmail this week.

Per James Wilkinson Sword:
>I've never seen one that even made me look twice.  Spelling and grammatical er
rors everywhere, bad >alignment, wrong server used on all the links, blatantly
obvious.

One idea I have heard is that:

- Sending spam email is essentially cost-free, so you send
 lots of the stuff.

- The overhead starts kicking in when the scam's followup involves
 people contacting the target.

- They want to minimize the number of contacts with people above a
 certain intelligence/sophistication level because they tend to
 be unproductive ("False Positives") - yet eat up resources.

- Consequently they craft the email so that anybody with half a brain
 will ignore it and the people left - who respond - are the easiest
 of targets.

There is an interesting thread on this subject in Quora:
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-email-scams-written-in-broken-English

Microsoft has a white paper on this subject:
http://tinyurl.com/hem9h9j
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-s
ay-they-are-from-nigeria/

I didn't download the entire PDF - just read the abstract... but it
seems to be consistent with other comments.
--
Pete Cresswell

--- ViaMAIL!/WC v2.00
* Origin: ViaMAIL! - Lightning Fast Mailer for Wildcat!  (1:261/20)