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Likely the answer here ... http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/96121/why-do-phishing-emails-have-spelling-and-grammar-mistakes http://security.stackexc
by damian2000 10y ago
Likely the answer here ...
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/96121/why-do-phishing-emails-have-spelling-and-grammar-mistakes http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/96121/why-do-phi...
This may well be for the same reason as many scammers rely on the tired old 'Nigerian Prince' strategy: by self-selecting for gullible targets, they can be more efficient.
In phishing, as in scams, sending the initial batch of emails is the easy part. The hard part is coaxing information out of the target (which can require a concerted exchange of emails). That can represent a significant investment of time.
As a result, it's really important to ensure that the people you correspond with may actually give you the information that you're after. It can therefore be advantageous to send a badly-drafted email, on the basis that the people who respond to that are likely to be gullible enough to be phished.
- athenot 10y agoIt would be interesting to deploy a network of bots that responds to those scams, posing as gullible targets. That would then significantly increase the workload of scammers and reduce their availability to conduct scams on actual people. Thoughts?
- overcast 10y agoThere are groups that already do these types of things.
- athenot 10y agoOh nice! Would you happen to have a few names to guide a Google query?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- damian2000 10y agohttp://www.autobait.com/faq/ http://www.autobait.com/faq/
- dagwaging 10y agoideally we'd stop the scams at the source, rather than flooding the internet's infrastructure with even more pointless traffic but i'd still enjoy seeing a project that automates the wasting of scammers' time even something as simple as piping their emails and responses to/from cleverbot could be moderately effective
- vidarh 10y agoPeople are notoriously bad at spotting bots. Just a bunch of canned messages can draw people into surprisingly lengthy conversations when they are desperate to get something out of you... The biggest problem would probably be to vary the exchanges enough to prevent them from learning to pick them out after a few exchanges.