Bonfire beneficiaries

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Subeditor Humphrey Evans points out to me that the grammar of phishing spam emails is getting worse and worse, rather than better. He recently saw one that contained this text:

The sum of (6.5M Euros only will be transfer into your account after the processing of all relevant legal documents with your name as the bonfire beneficiary, the transfer will be made by Draft or telegraphic Transfer (T/T), conformable in 3 working days as soon as you apply to the bank director.

That "bonfire beneficiary" bit is an eyebrow-raiser, isn't it? It seems to be an error for the Latin phrase bona fide "good faith".

It's getting easy for anyone of normal intelligence to see from the language of phishing emails that they couldn't possibly be genuine. The one quoted above mentioned a bank in Burkina Faso but the return address mentioned Ghana. The only thing missing was a mention of Nigeria. You may recall that (as I mentioned once before) there is a research paper by Cormac Herley of Microsoft, "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?" that gives rigorous quantitative reasons why phishers should deliberately make their emails illiterate and ridiculous: reducing the "victim density" increases the profit. It pays to screen out respondents who cannot be guaranteed to be absolutely clueless and utterly naïve.

That wouldn't include you Language Log readers. You will have read my earlier posts like "Forensic syntax for spam detection" and "Inexpert and expert phishing spam" and "Learn your grammar, Becky" and "Moron phishing"… Still, be careful out there. Don't send any up-front administrative fees to West Africa.

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