Subj : Re: Lots of phishing emails "from" Yahoo and Hotmail this week. To : All From : Petecresswell Date : Sun Jan 01 2017 07:10 pm From: "(PeteCresswell)" Subject: Re: Lots of phishing emails "from" Yahoo and Hotmail this week. Per James Wilkinson Sword: >I've never seen one that even made me look twice. Spelling and grammatical er rors everywhere, bad >alignment, wrong server used on all the links, blatantly obvious. One idea I have heard is that: - Sending spam email is essentially cost-free, so you send lots of the stuff. - The overhead starts kicking in when the scam's followup involves people contacting the target. - They want to minimize the number of contacts with people above a certain intelligence/sophistication level because they tend to be unproductive ("False Positives") - yet eat up resources. - Consequently they craft the email so that anybody with half a brain will ignore it and the people left - who respond - are the easiest of targets. There is an interesting thread on this subject in Quora: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-email-scams-written-in-broken-English Microsoft has a white paper on this subject: http://tinyurl.com/hem9h9j https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-s ay-they-are-from-nigeria/ I didn't download the entire PDF - just read the abstract... but it seems to be consistent with other comments. -- Pete Cresswell --- ViaMAIL!/WC v2.00 * Origin: ViaMAIL! - Lightning Fast Mailer for Wildcat! (1:261/20) .