4.20.2006

teaching the crooks to spell.

Phishing is quite a brilliant concept. It plays upon fear and idiocy, both of which humans in general seem to have quite a lot of. I've been getting several phishing emails a week now, and I have grown increasingly irritated about them. My email provider is competant enough to send them straight to the spam box, so their presence isn't really in my way. No, I am insulted at how obvious they are. It seems like you have to really be an idiot now to fall for these things. I could understand back when phishing was new and no one knew about it, then you could probably get away with some of the obvious mistakes. They might look a little odd or possibly make you wonder for half a second, but then you realize that your PayPal account is in jeopardy, so you forget that little nagging feeling and sign away your life. I even rather enjoy the little irony they present: you give away your personal information to criminals to protect your personal information from criminals. No, phishing irritates me because it is an insult to my intelligence.

There are all the obvious signs that the credit card companies will list on their websites. For one thing, if you click the link and it doesn't even go to the site it says it's going to, that's a big hint. Then there is fact that the real companies have sworn up and down to never ask for your information in that manner. You have to go to their real site and sign in with your user name and whatever. Fine, you follow those rules, you'll be safe. But there are other signs that make these emails reek of a scam.

The misspelled words really get to me. I guess you've all figured that out by now, as misspellings anywhere get on my nerves. If my credit card company can't spell, then I don't want them to be my credit card company. Who knows what else they're screwing up while they're ignoring their spell-check? I am always tempted to red ink those emails and send them back with a message like "not working up to your potential" scrawled on there somewhere. I feel like this is an obvious one, a sign that the phishers have gotten lazy. It's not like their job is all that hard anyway, so they really have no excuse for slacking off. I can pretty much tell instantly that an email from "Verifyed by Visa" is not legit.

There is also the fact that I repeatedly get these emails about accounts that I do not have. Oh, crap, my American Express account might be in danger. Wait - is this an email from the future, when I actually have an American Express account?

The thing is, people wouldn't do this scam if it didn't work. There are people who use the internet but still haven't bothered to educate themselves about protecting themselves there. There are people who can't recognize poor use of the English language. And there are people who who no longer even remember what accounts they do and don't have. I'm almost tempted to say that these people deserve to be cheated, but I won't go that far. Phishing is pretty rotten.

By the way, most companies (the legit ones) have a way for you to report phishing. If you go to the real website of the company, there's usually an email address where you can forward the phishy emails. I've found that doing this actually helps decrease the amount of spam I get, plus I get to feel like I'm doing something to help when I don't have time to write acidic and sarcastic replies to the bums. Everybody wins.

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