Changing the Terms

I receive over a hundred e-mails every day, and about 20% are phishing scams (is that a redundancy)? I don't even bother to read them and can tell immediately they are fake (you have won a trip/tool set/gift card; your subscription to Netflix/Microsoft/Quicken has expired).

However, the most recent e-mail from "McAfee" piqued my curiosity because of the "espouse" in the subject line. Espouse ("to become involved with or support an activity or opinion"), although not obscure, is not a word used in regular parlance.

Looking into the text, I saw that "espouse" had replaced "expired" and "submit" was substituted for "subscription." The scammers had changed common phishing words to evade e-mail screens. They were successful in that they made me look at it...this one time.