The Biggest Mistakes Internet Scammers Make, And Why They Continue to Make Them

Almost all of us have at some point come into contact with an internet scam. We’ve all been contacted by those wealthy foreign billionaires who want to transfer all their money into our accounts, and we’ve all had strange e-mails from ‘PayPal’ asking for our login details.

But fortunately most of us won’t fall for these scams.

To most of us these devious attempts are transparent and it’s only on the odd occasion when they manage to catch us off guard or when we’re in a particularly anxious mood that they’re likely to slip through the net. This is because scammers often tend to make a number of mistakes – over and over again. Here we will look at the most common mistakes that scammers tend to make and at why they continue to make them

One of the easiest ways to spot a phishing scam or something similar is to look for bad spelling. Scammers almost always use bad grammar and bad spelling and this is something that can instantly tell you you’re not dealing with a real organisation.

So why does this happen? Why when scammers are so good at creating fake websites and getting you to click them, are they so bad at then making sure that they are well spelled? Surely that the easy bit?

Well the main reason is that mostly these scammers don’t speak English as their first language. The majority of hackers in fact do not, and as such they aren’t as good at creating believable content that can trick readers (fortunately for us). Of course these guys (and gals) could just outsource the process and get someone to write the text on Fiverr, but that’s the thing about scammers: they’re lazy and they’re not willing to put money or time into creating something good. Why do you think they’re in this gig in the first place?

Another quick way to tell a site or e-mail isn’t 100% legit is to look at the resolution. Generally those images tend to be a little low res and of course this isn’t something that a real company would allow for their site.

So what’s the reason for this? Well generally it’s because the images have been saved in such a way as to reduce file size – which is handy for sending out lots and lots of e-mails en-mass. At the same time it’s also often again just because the product is rushed and not handled professionally – the scammers’ laziness once again gets the better of them.

A lot of scammers also make the mistake of trying to go straight in ‘for the kill’ as it were. In other words, they will ask you to send them money, or they will ask you to send your login details. We all know by now that real institutions never request login details, and we all know that some things are just too good to be true (wealthy kings don’t tend to transfer all of their funds).

If they were a little less direct and if they came up with a more believable conceit, then maybe a few more people would fall for their tricks.

And that’s the problem with scammers – they’re very smart, but also very dumb…