I’ve noticed a common theme among emails that are scams and/or phishing. They often have an obvious typo somewhere – it could be in the body of the email or the URL. Either way, there’s a fairly obvious tell.
I’ve wondered why that is. The default explanation is that it is either (a) written by a native English speaker or (b) useful to get past spam filters. Both are plausible.
Another theory – on that I subscribe to – is that it is done to filter out people who pay careful attention to these details and, thus, are less likely to be scammed. Scamming people takes time and optimizing the funnel to make sure scammers are only spending time on people most likely to fall for the trap is a powerful strategy.
It is why we are trained to take care of the little details on a presentation or document we write. A typo here or there can raise questions about our ability to pay attention to the details.
And details matter.
PS: I write my posts the previous night and realized I scheduled yesterday’s post for today by mistake. 2 posts today as a result!
