gaz wrote:More simply it narrows the pool of respondents down quickly, leaving the scammers to focus on those who were trusting/vulnerable/lonely/foolish/greedy/gullible enough to have responded despite the bad grammar and spelling.
Psamathe wrote:On a serious note (sorry), but I read a (serious) article some time ago regarding the spelling and grammar in these scams and apparently it is completely deliberate. The scammers are probably capable of writing better english than most of us are. But they are also smart and they have a target audience (those who are taken in by such scams). They don't want to waste their time on handling responses from people who will not be taken in by their scam and writing the poor spelling/grammar means that those who are unlikely to be suckers will not bother to even respond. But those who are more likely to be taken-in don't notice the language errors as much. Thus it is a deliberate filtering technique, saving them time (and thus money).
I must admit, I wasn't aware of this, but having done a bit of googling, I can see how this is plausible.
Scary, because it introduces another dimension into the multiple layers of deception!
I have to say, I find it quite an effort to
deliberately introduce bad grammar into what I write (aside from the odd split infinitive with which everyone is familiar, thanks to Captain Kirk!
). I know this because some years ago I registered incognito on a forum with which I'd had previous hostile issues (not this forum I hasten to add!). In order to further disguise my identity, I tried to introduce a measure of
convincing poor grammar into the few posts I made on that forum. I found this was far from easy: old habits die hard, and I soon gave up the attempt.
Needless to say, writing like Nigel Molesworth is
not what I'm on about, as any fule kno....
