Scam Emails
and a way to tell them from real emails.

Beware of Scams

October 7, 2013

I have just received a fascinating email. The green parts are more edits. Here, have a read...

First off, two things stand out to me here one is that there are times of great clarity, the other is that there are times of absolute complete lack of legibility. Meaning someone with an advanced college education wrote this article and someone who can't string a full sentence together copied it and changed it to be not duplicate content, but had no clue how to spell or do grammar and flubbed up badly.

A third thing I notice is change in "voice" between the two. This translates to tell me that you are first dealing with again, someone who write parts of the email, and copied (stole) and pasted (plagiarized) other parts of the email.

If you received an email like this, it is highly likely that the advice about your website was stolen from an online article someone wrote reviewing another person's website for them, probably off an SEO forum, where folks post links to their sites and ask for SEO reviews. Because of this it is highly unlikely that the errors found were actually errors on your site, at all.

I question the credibility of someone who has grammar errors to such an extent that each of the first 5 words is incorrect in one way or another. In the first sentence alone there are spelling, capitalization, subject-verb agreement, and pronoun errors. There are so many errors that it can not be read out loud and even understand what in the heck he is trying to say. I started counting the grammar errors. I stopped counting when I reached 70 and I stopped reading about half way down the page.

Seriously, half of those a spell checker would have caught, and most of them are simple things taught in 3rd grade grammar.

Third grade, that's 8 years old.

An 8 year old child can write a more legible email.

He claims to be the head of a business and he can't even get that much right? Look at how he says he is the head of the business. Seriously?

It is painfully obvious that you are dealing with someone whom English is not their first language, and yet they are claiming to offer you SEO advise for an English language website and an English language search engine? Please. This is a scam artist trying to use scare tactics to get you to buy something.

Yes there are all sorts of business professionals with dyslexia and autism (I have both) and all sorts of things that mess up their ability to type and write proper grammar. That's why they have spell checkers, grammar checkers, editors, and secretaries to double check everything, including emails, before they go out. No business profession worth his salt, regardless of disability is going to let a sickeningly shoddy email like this one slip out of his office. That's a big way to tell you are reading a scam email.

It always makes me laugh when I see these scam emails written by scam artists who  claim to be the head/owner of a company and than they don't even know how to spell the name of their own company! Can't he at least look at the letterhead on his desk or the sign out front? Oh wait, he can't do that, because there is no letterhead on his desk and no sign out front, because he doesn't really work there, let alone own the place.

It should say "I am the owner of ___" not "i is owner ____".

It should say "I am the head of ___" not "i is head ___".

Why are the "I"s not capitalized?

Since when does "am" become "is"?

Why did he just decide not to use "the" or "of" at all?

Did you ever see one of those emails telling the sob story of how great-grand daddy died in a plane crash in Africa and left them 10 million dollars, but they need a $20,000 bank deposit to access the money so could you please be a good person and wire it to them via Western Union? These is the same people, right on down the the same grammar errors. Don't believe a word they say no matter how good it sounds.

Biggest way to tell this is a scam email? Two words: Western Union.

Africa doesn't have a banking system like America does, or he'd just come right out and say "Give me your bank account # so I can just withdraw your life savings." That's why he is using Western Union. Western Union is good for travelers because it is available absolutely everywhere. Unfortunately, because it's available every where and super easy to use, it's also the payment method of course scam artists use to request money from you.

Never trust a business that emails you with "i is owner great wonful busnus and accept Western Union, plese be good chrysten and fund now.  i is wait for hear you."

Well at least he knows how to spell Western Union, even if he can't spell the name of the business he supposedly owns. Do you know why he can spell Western Union? Because he goes to his local Western Union office every day to pick up wired money from suckers, and thus he can remember how to spell it seeing how he sees it often enough, unlike the name of his business, which is most likely is one of hundreds of businesses he is claiming to be head of.

Also a business professional isn't going to ask you to be a good Christian. A business professional would know that kind of talk could lose him business at best and land him in prison for 2 years at worst. Any time someone ends an email trying to guilt trip you with religion, you know you are dealing with a very simple minded easily swayed, gullible person who thinks you are as ignorant and as easily scared by deities as they are. This is often an indication of someone with no education and very little social interaction with "modern civilization" and a strong indication that you are dealing with someone from a third-world country. (There are several psychological studies and profiles written on the connection between fear of religion and lack of intellectual development, Google them and read a few.) A well education business professional knows that there are laws against mentioning religion in business correspondence. Lack of adherence to these laws is a prime indicator that you are reading a scam email.

I think it is utterly hilarious, he is checking your website for errors when he can't even be bothered check his own email for errors. Even if any ideas he has here are accurate, his lack of professionalism devoids any credibility his ideas might have had. How could he possible be expected to do a good job in checking for errors on your website, if he isn't even able to do a good job checking for errors in his email? The answer to that is easy: Because it's not a real email to begin with, it's nothing but a scam email.

Don't waste your time worrying about it. Don't even waste your time reading it. Just delete it, block the sender, and go about your daily business. You have better and more important things to do than read scam emails.