Saturday, July 18, 2009

Scammer Grammar

I checked my school e-mail today, hoping to hear more about my housing, something from my roommate, perhaps a scholarship or something fun from GALL or the CompSci department. I didn't get any of those, but I did get a good laugh from an e-mail that I received from the "help desk." It said that the message contained "urgent information" in the title, so I opened it up to take a peek.
They asked for my password, so I immediately took it as a scam. Come on, guys. Not only did I grow up using computers and protecting my own personal information, but I also happen to have some common sense. And the spelling and grammatical errors in the body--oooooh, they drive me absolutely insane!

Here are the winners from this particular message--

"You are adviced to send us your account details." -- "Adviced." Really, if you're going to try to scam passwords off of people, then at least have the decency to spell-check your stupid little e-mail that everyone laughs at and deletes (and possibly takes the time to blog about).

"All Staff/Student" -- "Staff" is plural. "Student" is not. Seriously.

"Further more be informed that we will not hesitate to delete all email accounts that are not functioning, to create more space for new user." -- "User" should be plural. Furthermore, "furthermore" is one word. I won't even get into comma placement...

"After upgrading, a password reset link will be sent to your email for new
password." -- First of all, that's just strange. And the latter half of that sentence is also strange.

"Once it is confirmed you will have no problem signing into your account." -- I just find this one hysterical because, well...if you fall for this scam, you WILL have a problem signing into your account.

"This is a scheduled maintenance period that will be occuring each month, due to the amount of junk email our staff/student are receiving." -- It's "occurring." Getting people to reset their passwords each month would be ridiculously inconvenient. And they made the "staff/student" error AGAIN. And...okay, I said I wouldn't start with the commas... :P

I'm not normally the kind of person who will call someone out for their poor grammar and spelling (even though it eats me up on the inside), but I'm willing to make exceptions for the idiots out there who make a poor attempt at scamming uninformed people out of their passwords. I just wonder if the people who write these types of e-mails are actually stupid or if they're just lazy.
I also have to admit that I've always wanted to respond to one of these e-mails with a fake username and password that are completely vulgar and disturbing, just for laughs. That's my sense of humor for you.
In case you didn't know and didn't figure it out from reading this, an e-mail asking for your password is a scam. I can't think of a single situation where it wouldn't be. Although the e-mail looks legit, it's NOT. There's a way to make a sender's plain old free e-mail account look like a university or company e-mail. Yes, the message is going to tell you that your account is going to be deleted and whatnot. Don't worry about it. I've gotten literally dozens of these e-mails throughout my life--haven't responded to a single one--and I haven't had a single account deleted yet. If you do respond to the message and share your account details, the person who sent the e-mail will have complete control over your account and any personal information that comes with it. And the first thing those people do when they access your account? Change the password so that YOU can't get in. So treat your password like your toothbrush and don't share it with anyone. And change it every few months. :P :P :P

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