What if computer hackers wrote better English

Jul 29, 2020

Many of you have been repeatedly taught that when you see an email with a lot of grammatical errors, just delete. However, what if the hackers wrote good English, how many of you would not fall victim?

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

The commonest trick in the computer hacking world is to play on people's emotions; personal, financial, moral or otherwise and this is called Social Engineering.

We have all received an email at a certain point in our internet life telling us we have won a ''Lucky 1 million dollar jackpot'' and if you have been promised more, congratulations and i hope you collected your winning prize; Or that attorney telling you his client left you a fortune and you need to send some money to process it.

And lately they have got more bold telling you they have your nude pictures and threatening to release them if you do not pay a ransom.

Welcome to the world of phishing, netizens (citizens is to the world as netizens is to the internet). Phishing is a simple process where one keeps sending you emails trying to lure you into a certain trap and usually they are after your money or sensitive information that can help them hack you, your company or any contact of yours.

There is however one common rule with all phishing emails and they contain a lot of grammatical errors.

The reason for the errors is that many of these hackers/phishers are not well educated and most hail from Eastern Europe (mostly the former soviet union) where English is not taught on a large scale and most have put their time and effort into studying computers and computer hacking after the many wars and poverty that has befallen them over the last few decades, with their main intention being to use what they have learned to hack and steal.

Many of you have been repeatedly taught that when you see an email with a lot of grammatical errors, just delete. However, what if the hackers wrote good English, how many of you would not fall victim?
 
This is increasingly becoming the case with many Nigerian based scammers. It is a proven fact Nigerians have taken the internet scam game to another level stealing millions of dollars online through email phishing.

Forget their accents, like most Ugandans, many Nigerians actually write very well constructed English sentences and they are using this to their advantage lately. You can read this story (https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/12/us/ray-hushpuppi-alleged-money-laundering-trnd/index.html) and you will be amazed at the level of intricacy and scale of scam this 37-year-old Nigerian has managed to pull off and live a billionaire's lifestyle.

They deploy a simple trick, where they open up an email address similar to their victims or convince them to reset their email passwords while they have set up traps to receive the reset credentials, and the rest is child's play.

In a nut shell, whilst you have been told that all scamming/phishing emails are poorly written, welcome to the world of modern online scammers where the poor grammar does not apply anymore.

Advisory: you simply have to know what you subscribed to online, do not reply to emails claiming you won lotteries you have never entered and most of all have checks and balances in place in your companies or organisations where people that control finances do not just reply to emails with instructions to pay so and so- please pick up a phone and call that person  to ensure they sent you the money transfer request.

People and companies are losing lots of money because they cannot pick up the phone to speak to the other person to confirm they actually sent the email.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});