Photo by Jay Wennington on Unsplash

Why are scam emails so badly written?

Typos, tuypos, and more typose

If you have an email account, you’re probably already had a fair share of scam emails come your way — including the ones with the Nigerian Prince emailing you directly for help, or you winning the lottery you never took part in.

An email scam is intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual by means of email. The prospect of a ‘bargain’ or ‘something for nothing’ can be very tempting. Email fraud, as with other ‘bunco schemes,’ usually targets naive individuals who put their confidence in schemes to get rich quickly. These include ‘too good to be true’ investments or offers to sell popular items at ‘impossibly low’ prices.

However, something distinct about a majority of these emails is that it consists of bad grammar or misspelled words. Why is this so?

What is probably the major reason:

1. “The people writing scam emails genuinely have bad grammar.”
   
   English is the most widely spoken language at around~20% of the world population. However, there are only about ~400 million native english speakers (which is only around a quarter of all English speakers).
   
   Also, the English language isn’t really that straightforward — spellings are often non-intuitive and grammar is surprisingly tricky. Not to mention informal rules such as ‘I before E except after C’ that make you question why someone would come up a rule like this when it’s not true in so many cases (Eg. caffeine, leisure, glacier…) or idioms such as ‘raining cats and dogs’, which will make any person learning the language scream WTF when they try to make sense of it. The result is that the English language is a nightmare to learn, and consequently, it’s extremely hard for non-native speakers to pass off as native speakers.

Other reasons I came across, but might not completely agree with:

1. “Most educated or cautious people would easily spot the typos and bad grammar. Thus, the only people who would reply to the email are those that are super gullible anyway.”
   
   The claim is that somehow the mistakes weed out the smarter people. But if gullible people reply to poorly written emails, they will most definitely reply to well written emails. So why not just write well, so that more people might fall into the trap?
   
   However, there’s a side of the argument that does make sense. If smarter people spend time responding to the email, maybe doing a few more steps, before realizing it’s a scam and backing out, it’s a waste of the scammer’s time and resources. In such a case, it might just be best to only target the subset of really gullible people.
2. Misspelled words could trick spam filters
   
   Your email provider most likely already provides some sort of spam filtering service to you. A pre-defined set of algorithms run on your email — for example examining the metadata of the email, or seeing if the content resembles other spam emails. If the probability of the email being a spam exceeds a certain threshold, it it marked so and it never reaches your inbox.
   
   Historically, therefore, it might have been possible that spammers deliberately misspelled words so filters don’t catch the spam-like content. That’s probably no longer the case as I would assume that typos would now trigger modern spam filters, instead of tricking them.
3. “Writing perfect english seems fishy too”.
   
   Hmm maybe, but not really. Of course if you write extremely fancily, and substitute each word with the longest synonym you can find, then there might be a problem. But this doesn’t explain why the emails are so badly written, just write it somewhat normally. I doubt people make emails bad deliberately to avoid looking fishy.

Obviously not all scammers have bad spellings. Sophisticated phishing attempts are not unheard of, and the fake emails are almost indistinguishable from legitimate ones, at least from a grammatical point of view. Phishing, by the way, is not a typo. That’s how it’s spelt, I’m not scamming you. I am a legitimate dude, and this article is not a scam email.

Other cool things to check out:

• Scam baiters: the batman-equivalent in the world of scam emails. Basically the good guy playing along with the scammer to waste the latter’s time and resources.
• This TED talk about a hilarious email chain between a comedian and a scammer.
• Or some legit advice from this dude:

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