10 ms·
To be honest, one can easily realize that this "Marc Cannon" is a fake with the amount of spelling and grammatical errors he makes. Real professionals do not ma
by nigamanth 4y ago
To be honest, one can easily realize that this "Marc Cannon" is a fake with the amount of spelling and grammatical errors he makes. Real professionals do not make spelling and grammar errors such as:
"Do you have any other question ?"
"Good morning how are you this morning."
"I will send you later"
"Good morning, How are you doing today ?"
"This is very disrespectful and all director are to meet you for training on monday and you're 'suppose' to have all your materials before then"
It was practically a dead giveaway when the guy used "autonation.com@proton.me", because the guy doesn't have access to the domain's email, he probably didn't even understand what you were saying.
- yellowapple 4y agoI guess I'm pretty desensitized from having had so many colleagues with atrocious professional writing skills; 'cause the writing itself didn't really raise any red flags for me until "Marc Cannon" instantly blew up at the notion of a check needing to clear before money from it could be spent.
- bagels 4y agoDefinitely a cause for alarm for someone that supposedly works in software in Florida, but there are professionals who don't have English as their first language.
- nigamanth 4y agoWell, yeah there are professionals who don't have English as their first language, but I mean making a mistake in the most basic punctuation marks? Sure if he doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its" then it's fine, but if he doesn't know how to properly use commas in a sentence then one must question his professionality. Additionally, there was no way he doesn't have the office email ID.
- nigamanth 4y agoWell, yeah there are professionals who don't have English as their first language, but I mean making a mistake in the most basic punctuation marks? Sure if he doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its" then it's fine, but if he doesn't know how to properly use commas in a sentence then one must question his professionality. Additionally, there was no way he couldn't have had access to automation.com
- mgerdts 4y agoI find it fairly common for people that do not have US English as their first language to not use punctuation the way that I was taught in school. I do that too when I think the punctuation is wrong for what I'm conveying (especially . or , inside quotes, when quotes are a command). Non-native people commonly use quotation marks that I don't know how to produce with my keyboard, put $ after the number, etc. A space before a question mark is not unheard of. The somewhat read flag is "kindly" (likely Indian?) with "Marc" (likely not Indian) but it's common for people with a name that's difficult for Americans to understand/spell to use an Americanized name. Using an email address that doesn't match up with the company's well known domain name is a real problem. Suggesting payroll comes by something other than check or direct deposit is a red flag. Luckily, requesting money via wire transfer tipped this person off before things got real bad.
- scott_w 4y ago> The somewhat read flag is "kindly" (likely Indian?) with "Marc" (likely not Indian) but it's common for people with a name that's difficult for Americans to understand/spell to use an Americanized name. This is usually a Chinese thing, though. Indian people tend to just use their own names. Even then, a Chinese person would incorporate some of their name e.g. Mark Li. I’m not blaming OP here, of course. As he said, he was tired and it takes real bravery to put your hand up and say “I was nearly scammed!”
- asvitkine 4y agoSpace before a ? is the correct punctuation in French, for example.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- maximus-decimus 4y agoAs a non native speaker, I find it wild you think it's vs its is harder than punctuation. If somebody can't tell its from it's then they don't know what a verb is, which seems like a much more basic concept than punctuation to me.
- joeframbach 4y agoNo "Marc Cannon" would begin any sentence with "Kindly" either.
- nigamanth 4y agoA fake name, a fake job offer, a fake office, and a fake kit. If I was being interviewed I probably would have trolled this guy back by giving him fake money.
- tjr225 4y ago
- tjungblut 4y agoI was waiting the whole time for a request to buy some Google Play gift cards at the nearest store.
- genewitch 4y ago"Look, i'm giving you the gift cards on google, that's what you wanted!"
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoThere are definite flavours of Indian English here, which would be far less suspicious - if the scammer's name wasn't non-Indian. I suspect that, firstly, the scammer is not aware that their use of English flags them thus to native speakers, and secondly that they would in any case be subconsciously reluctant to use an Indian name anyway, perhaps because they (paradoxically) think it'd make it seem more like a scam rather than less.
- jestarray 4y agoI was not in the right state of mind, my brain weirdly skimmed and auto-corrected grammar mistakes. I thought it was weird but I was just happy and yet busy to think about it further.
- andsoitis 4y agoIs English your first language? I ask because in your first point you write: > Not too well antiquated with the job hiring process “Antiquated” means archaic or old-fashioned. There may be other errors in your article; I didn’t read the rest.
- wyldfire 4y agos/antiquated/acquainted/ - probably just a spelling error that was autocorrected to the wrong word.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jestarray 4y agoIt sounded right when I read it aloud and I'm still recovering from the flu. English is my first language but I still make clumsy mistakes with it.
- kodah 4y agoI recently reread some messages I wrote while and after I had Covid. I made mistakes like this too.
- nigamanth 4y agoYeah I mean when someone is happy and excited that they're going to get a job that pays $45 an hour then they probably won't care whether the employers know English or not.
- jefftk 4y agoThis is also a "red flag" that will probably stop being useful soon, as chatgpt etc make it easy for scammers to write things that don't have this kind of mistake.
- cookie_monsta 4y agoI don't know, I've had a couple of bosses who were native English speakers and they would dash off emails so fast obviously without reading them that it took me multiple reads to parse what they might be trying to say. If it were just punctuation or spelling errors I would have been happy. I suspect they wrote to their bosses much more carefully. But something as sketchy as this setup would have my antenna twitching anyway, so these kinds of mistakes would probably be red flags given that context, otherwise maybe not
- sean2 4y agoI gotta agree, poor grammar didn't stand out as a red flag to me. I've been through interview loops with like like 80% of the written and verbal correspondence was with people who had English as a second language and they frequently made similar grammatical mistakes. I'm pretty sure two of those companies were legitimately Intel and Amazon. I'm also surrounded by Asian immigrants in the US and its pretty common to take an English name (sometimes first and last) if your name is so full of non-ASCII characters that American's can't pronounce.
- simne 4y agoThanks for good point. I sometimes released, many extroverts (managers/tops nearly all extroverts), are tongue-tied, because they are not thinking before say. They act like Colt, polling any semi-relevant phrase from scrap-bag of memory, and shooting with it.
- abhinav061 4y agoScammers intentionally make grammatical mistakes. If you can spot the mistakes, they don't want to engage with you. (Of course, there are other reasons why would one spot yet ignore grammatical mistakes - sometimes it is because of the personal situation they are in, sometimes it's of empathy towards non-native English speakers)
- imiric 4y agoMost scammers aren't that smart. The grammatical mistakes just happen to work well for them as a filter.
- _vertigo 4y agoI’ve heard this a lot, but is it actually true?
- goto11 4y agoUnlikely. I believe it started as a hypothesis to explain the many spelling errors in scam mails, but I don't think this have ever been confirmed to be intentional. Hanlons Razor is probably appropriate here.
- pokepim 4y ago
- cpursley 4y agoThis is intentional. It's a filter for people who aren't thinking clearly (degraded mental capacity, uneducated, etc) and are more vulnerable.
- xmprt 4y agoThis reasoning has been used so many times and while it makes sense on the surface, if you think about it for a little longer, then you'd realize it's probably not true. For example, in this case, the bad grammar persisted even in the final stage where the money was about to be transferred. I don't think you really need to "filter" more people at that point.
- boosteri 4y agoI'm guessing there was a study of some kind and not just theoretical debate? In a way I would agree with you, but I can also see an argument for the contrary. As in you don't want to change the pattern at this point as that might fire some alarms and spook the horses.
- tosh 4y agoWhy Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria? (Cormac Herley, 2012) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...
- treve 4y agoWhy are you shaming the victim? Of course some people will fall through the cracks. It's not their fault
- Blackstone4 4y agoI read somewhere that some scammers do this deliberately to filter for easier targets.
- Veen 4y ago> Real professionals do not make spelling and grammar errors I've worked with lots of professionals, including founders and c-suite people, who appear barely literate in emails and online chat. They're often very good talkers and very bad writers.
- nicolas_t 4y agoThat's true but in that specific examples, all the errors and turn of phrase are typical of English speakers in India so it's a dead giveaway.
- lmarcos 4y agoBut what difference does it make? If I were a scammer I would: - buy a domain for 20 USD/year and create the corresponding hr@MyNiceAndSeriousLookingDomain.com - do what the scammer did in the blog post but without grammatical errors (I could even use chatgpt for that) and alway using my custom email address See. That's easy to fake. If people are willing to pay the scammers, then the grammar errors and proton emails do not matter
- stavros 4y agoBecause the real domain is already taken by the real company.
- ChoGGi 4y agoOne look-alike letter in the domain is all you need.
- stavros 4y agoI guess, but autonatlon.com kind of sticks out.
- jacurtis 4y agointernal-autonation.com is available right now for $10. autonation.inc is also available. I could generate 100 more like this that would fool most of the American population. Tech workers might be smart enough to avoid them, but the average person wouldn't think twice about these. For example imagine getting an email from recruiting@internal-autonation.com. Again, I know a tech worker who actually is likely to have purchased a domain might know what is happening here, but most Americans would think this is legit.
- brewdad 4y agoI've received completely legit emails from Chase Bank that used URLs that, on first glance, had to be fake. I followed up using alternate channels and found out that it wasn't a scam just poorly executed "security".
- felideon 4y ago
- jspash 4y ago"Good morning, How are you doing today ?" Except for the unnecessarily uppercased H and the extraneous space before the question mark, this is a perfectly fine English sentence, no?