Dear Beneficiary,
Have you ever received an email that begins this way? Usually it goes on – complete with poor grammar and misspellings – to explain how the rich ruler of some poverty-stricken African nation has died recently. And he has named YOU as his sole heir. You (yes, YOU!) can have millions of U.S. dollars wired directly into your bank account… IF ONLY you will just 1) share all your private banking information (so we can send you the fortune of your dreams, see?), or 2) divulge your mother’s maiden name along with your company email address and password (for verification purposes only, mind you), or 3) send a thousand bucks (for postage and handling, of course) to our embassy’s P.O. box in Nigeria… or Algeria… or Eritrea… or someplace similarly sandy.
Of course you have. We all have. It’s so ubiquitous, it has come to be known by a name that everybody recognizes: “The Nigerian Prince Scam.” But what most people don’t know… Well, read on if you dare – and would like to find out.
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Did you ever wonder about all those misspellings and bad grammar? Are the bad guys really so dumb, or so desperate, that they can’t at least hire somebody to do a decent spell check? The fact is, the grammar and spelling are an important part of the scammers’ business model. Most people recognize the “Dear Beneficiary” salutation for what it is: Danger! Warning! Scam Alert! My email provider not only recognizes, but also quarantines, such messages in a separate “Spam” folder – yours probably does too – so we never even have to see them if we don’t want to. Only the most credulous – and poorly protected – could possibly be taken in. Right?
But that is precisely the point. Phishers and scammers cast a wide net on the Internet these days, and for them, time is money. So, any time spent reading replies from folks saying “Quit sending me this bulls**t!” or “I’m gonna report yer worthless butt to the Better Business Bureau!” is, for them, not just upsetting: It’s time wasted. The grammar, the spelling, even the transparent and utterly bogus “Dear Beneficiary?” It acts as a screening mechanism. It ensures that only the most naive – and therefore, the most easily taken in – need reply. Sneaky, eh? Also, apparently, cost-effective. Go figure.
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I have a friend who shall remain nameless, but she asked me the other day if I could make the link for my daily blog entry look “less ominous.” By that I think she meant I should make it look less like a scam, and more like… well, what exactly? Something other than a scam? Whatever the heck that might be?
I told her there were a couple of options: The long link, which uses the full name of my blog’s website, dewconsulting.net/blog. Or, the short link, which is an alias (i.e. a translation) of the first, usually in the form of something like https://wp.me/this-that-or-the-other. I told my friend that, short of replacing “this-that-or-the-other” with “honestly-Lisa-this-is-not-a-scam,” there was precious little I could do to make it look “less ominous.” And in any case, she’s been getting these emails from me every single day for the last six months. So, like, did she really expect that I’d undergone a personality transplant in the past 24 hours? That I’d suddenly become a sociopathic spear-phishing scam artist? I mean, REALLY?
What we decided on finally – because I am nothing if not completely client-focused and also a nice guy – was a hyper-link. That’s where you say, “See Dithering Dan’s Delightfully Bombastic Blog Entry, here. And when you click on the here, it takes you to where ever: In this case, it takes you behind the scenes to one or the other of the two link addresses I outlined in the previous paragraph. Which, when you think about it for even half a second, is totally hilarious. Given that – if I really WERE a secretly scamming spear-phisher… well, you know. <Cue ominous movie music here – i.e The Theme from Jaws.>
Bottom line?
The Internet is every bit as dangerous as the sidewalk outside your home. The only way to be absolutely sure you’re 100% safe in either case is to completely sequester yourself away from all art, commerce, and human interaction. But then, would that really be a life worth living? Maybe the best course might be to keep your incredulous eyes peeled for obvious tip-offs: You know, like “Dear Beneficiary.” Well, that plus a hyper-link. Let’s not forget that one.