From: "(PeteCresswell)" 
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

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