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An Aussie in Japan

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Phishing for Phools

I just got sent an email that my email software cleverly recognised as being a phishing scam. After all these years of editing the law review, I'm pretty quick at picking up stupid English and poor logic, and so this message just jumped out at me. I have listed my reasons for suspecting that this email is not genuine below as footnotes.

Dear PayPal Online,(1)

We regret to inform you,(2) that we had to lock your PayPal Online Access
because we have reasons to believe(3) that your account may have been compromised by outside parties. In order to protect your sensitive information, we temporaly(4) suspended your account.

To reactivate your account, click on the link below and confirm your identity by completing the secure form what(5) will appear.

https://www.paypal-security.us (6)

We have seen unusual attempts for logging in regarding your personal account, therefore this confirmation regarding your account its only for security reasons. (7)

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.

Have questions?(8) Our online help screens(9) provide answers to many frequently asked questions.

You can also click the Customer Center tab then go to the Contact Us page to find a list of helpful numbers to call.

Please do not reply to this automatically generated e-mail.

We know you have a choice of banks. Thanks for choosing ours.

Sincerely, PayPal Team,(10)

(1) I don't have a PayPal account. Also, if I did, they would have had the email generated with the user name that is registered on my account.
(2) There shouldn't be a comma here.
(3) "Reasons"? I suspect that they mean to use the normal English expression "we have reason to believe".
(4) "Temporaly", hey? It would seem that they're getting all metaphysical on my non-existent account. Oh, and it's spelt incorrectly.
(5) That's just stupid.
(6) Obviously a false address.
(7) Wrong, wrong, wrong! The whole sentence is wrong.
(8) Speak English?
(9) "Screens" in the plural form is not necessarily wrong, but I think that the singular is more commonly used.
(10) Note the superfluous comma at the very end.

Finally, I don't think it helped any seeing as it was sent from the email address - nticserv0@dea.org. It's entirely possible that if any of these scam artists should happen upon my blog, they will take note of the glaring grammatical and logical omissions in their phishing message, fix them, thus improving their chances of conning more people. I suspect that the world will be safe, though.

3 Comments:

  • proper grammer is sexy after all!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9:34 AM  

  • In slightly disturbing news, somebody stumbled across my blog by typing in the email address that I mentioned into google. My blog was the only one listed...

    By Blogger KJ, at 6:13 PM  

  • you're a superfluous comma.

    By Blogger Fella, at 12:44 AM  

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