For as long as we’ve had technology, we’ve had scammers. It was only fifteen minutes after Grug son of Ogg invented the first wheel that he received a notification on the message drums that he was illegally parked in front of a restricted waterhole and would need to pay a fee of ten shiny pebbles. Investigating this, Grug discovered that the waterhole was not in fact restricted, and the message drums were being played by his old adversary Dronk son of Florg. However, although that early scam attempt ended happily, the stage had been set, and we’ve been living with the results ever since.
Much more recently, those primitive scams were replaced by something that, to be honest, is only a little bit less primitive. I’m talking here about our good friends the Nigerian scammers. These don’t always come from Nigeria, but they follow a basic pattern. They begin with an email, something like this:
My dear Brother or Sister in Christ, I am Mrs Penelope Wakandaforever, Widdow of the Late Minister of State, Sports, Racing and The Arts, Nigeria. I am Writeing to you In order to Commence Discussions on the matter of a Quantitie of Moneys, To Whit six Hundred thosand US Dollars ($700,000 US dollars)…
The emails typically go to explain, in this barely literate way, that this respectable member of Nigerian society wants to send a large portion of money to you in secret, so that you can pass it to some worthy charity without attracting the attention of the government. Naturally, you will then get to keep some of the money as a “fee for your services”. If you fall for this, the scammers will first ask you to send them some money, a “small” amount like a thousand dollars, to grease the wheels and assist in making the 
larger transfer. If you are particularly gullible, you may end up sending them increasingly larger “small” amounts for various reasons, all the while being promised a big pay-day that never comes.
You would have to be especially stupid to fall for this, and probably rather greedy as well. Unfortunately, there are always stupid and greedy people, enough to keep these scammers in business, which is why it’s still going on. Looking through my own email spam folder, I see a very low-effort version with the words “Good Day, Please, I want to discuss a business proposal with you…” as well as a genuine old-school Nigerian scam that begins “Greetings to you, You have been gifted US$,18,700.000 Million (eighteen million seven hundred thousand) in 2025 Donation Funds. Contact me only at my private email below for your claiming…” Exciting!
So it still happens.
Escalation: the scammers discover spell-check
There is a theory that the terrible spelling and grammar in these emails is a feature, not a bug. The idea, I think, is that intelligent, well-educated people like you and me would never fall for something so obvious, but that’s all right because they don’t want people like you and me to fall for it. Stupid people have money too, and they are much less trouble for a busy scammer because they don’t ask questions like “why Do You put Capital letters In Random places in Your emails?” and “since when does the Nigerian government have a Minister of State for Sports, Racing and the Arts?” Instead, they believe what they’re told, which is what the scammers want. So the spelling is a way to weed out people who won’t be profitable.
In recent years, however, it appears that the number of stupid rich people who can’t spell has diminished somewhat, and so the scammers have turned to other targets. I discovered this when I recently put an advertisement on Facebook, shown at the right. I don’t do that often, but I tried it last Easter and had some success, so I thought I’d give it another try, This time it didn’t seem to attract any new customers, but I did get a steady stream of emails that claimed to be from Meta, the company behind Facebook, but were really scams.
They started coming not long after my ad was approved, and continued for the entire time it was running. They looked very official, with all the same styling and language as the real Meta emails, but crucially they were addressed to “Dear Huon Computer Solutions” rather than to “Dear Paul Sleigh” like the real ones always were. And when I hovered my mouse over the links, they pointed to some very dodgy-looking addresses, not facebook.com or anything like it. Instant red flag!
Here’s an example of one. Click or tap to see it full-size.
It’s quite convincing. A strong sense of urgency, a lot of sentences with verbs that agree with their nouns, and not a single Out of Place Capital letter To Be seen. If not for the fact that I also had emails from the same alleged source that indicated that my ad was running with no trouble, and which addressed me by name, I would almost have worried!
I am worried, though, at this change in focus. Previously, those of us who made it through high school English with better than a failing grade could fool ourselves that the scammers weren’t after us. It’s the stupid people, we could say, carelessly putting aside the fact that dyslexia or an interrupted school career are nothing to do with stupidity and it’s insulting to say otherwise. But now, the vultures have come home to roost: having milked the poor spellers dry, the scammers are employing English graduates of their own to make their scams look plausible to the rest of us. Where will that end up? Nowhere good, I’m sure.
At least we can rely on the email addresses and the links, though. They can’t spoof them and make us think they’re someone we already know and trust, right? … Right? Well, as it happens, that’s not as certain as it once was. Tune in next time when I tell you about the next, even more disturbing development in scam emails, known as the Laryngitis Scam. It gets worse!