Got a spam email that I opened because the headline — “office uk” — made me think someone had sent me something fun about David Brent et al.
But what I got instead was a very junky, amateurish-looking Word document that began:
We write to inform you that we head a meeting last week regarding unclaimed funds of (500,000.00 GBP) here in our office, and your file was one of them that was opened by the Bank of England Director (Mark Carney) and fine out that your winning price have not yet deliver to you or transfer to your account due to your country Government strict rules and laws in the banking system, and also your low co-operation.
Note: Bank of England is given you second opportunity to claim this amount as your file has been open again by the Director (Mark Carney). You are to contact (Mr. Adam Payment Approval Manager) (Bank of England) with your personal details and quote him your Reference code… without any further delay….
Look, whoever you are: I’ll believe you’re with the Bank of England when you master the Queen’s English.
Harrumph.
Now watch — my snobbishness just cost me half a million quid. Which I could have used…
Related Posts
Criminality. It’s everywhere. Shame we just shake our heads and can’t put these thieves away.
They aren’t so much thieves, who take things from us against our will, as confidence gamers, who play on some people’s belief that they can get something for nothing (or some “token” “claim fee”)…..
The scammers must make some money or they wouldn’t keep doing it! There must indeed be one born every minute!
I can understand why a lot of cons work, but one so poorly written?
I’ve heard that this is part of the strategy. That way they weed out anyone with sense. It’s the same with the Nigerian Prince scam. If you’re the one guy in the country that doesn’t know any better, then they have found just who they were looking for.
No different than supposedly intelligent college bound students who load themselves up with debt to get degrees that have no job prospects. Or those who got second mortgages to fund the purchase of vacations and big screen TVs. Plenty of dumb people out there. P.T. Barnum probably was understating the opportunities to find suckers.
Actually, as I have found in a long career dealing with letters to the editor, and now with helping clients communicate their messages more effectively, there are a lot of otherwise smart people who seem quite incapable of expressing themselves in writing without committing embarrassing errors.
I hate to use her as an example because I like and respect her, but take a look at that release from Beth Bernstein earlier this week. It wasn’t bad (and nowhere nearly as bad as this spam), but it had a number of small punctuation errors, and at least one really unfortunate word choice — calling the questions she had received about whether she would run an “inquisition.”
On an important message such as that, I wish she had run it by a pedant like me before sending it out…
But as I say, it’s not bad. I could point to far, far worse examples from educated people, but I don’t want to embarrass them.
I commit plenty of careless errors myself in this stream-of-consciousness medium. Everybody needs an editor, and I don’t have one (at least, not on the front end before publication — y’all kindly point out many errors that I go back and fix). I seldom even go back and read what I wrote myself before publishing. It’s hard enough to find the time to write it.
But if I’m preparing a really momentous communication, I take a great deal of care — and get at least one person to check behind me.
Actually, going back and looking at that Bernstein item, it’s not a good example of what I’m talking about at all. It’s better than I remembered. I just remembered the first time I read it, when I thought, “She needed an editor on this…”
Well, no one expects a South Carolina Inquisition
Yeah, but if you’re a business, like a bank, the secretary should be making sure the spelling and grammar are ok.