Yesterday I received one of the variants of the AOL phishing scam. The message said that my AOL mailbox had exceeded "it [sic] storage limit" (BTW, at least half the time scam messages have spelling and/or grammatical mistakes, which a real business would never tolerate in its official e-mails) and that I should "click here" to fix the problem.
What distinguishes this hoax is that it was supposedly signed by "AOL! CEO Marissa Mayer", who, of course, is actually the current Yahoo! CEO hired from Google two years ago. The message did garner a chuckle from yours truly before it was sent to the junk folder.
Why don't scammers, who have at least a modicum of skill and intelligence, proofread their appeals? Possible answer: their errors are a feature, not a bug. It's time-consuming for them to reel in a sucker "phish", so scammers don't want to waste time on intelligent skeptics who won't bite. Responders to the crudely prepared invitations are only the gullible, the theory goes. One counter-measure:
for as many people as possible to pretend, at least for a short while, to fall for the scam but not send money, thus increasing the number of expensive false positives the scammers have to deal with.I'll add "stringing along the scammers" to the burgeoning list of things to do when I have more time.
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