"There's a sucker born every minute" - P.T. Barnum
So I check out my inbox at Hotmail and this, the contents of the most recent email is at the top of the list:
"We have a job opening for the position of Accounts recievable officer. Would
you like to work from your home and get paid weekly? We are offering this
position to all interested applicants. Please carefully read through.
ASHLEY FURNITURE COMPANY is a well established Manufacturing Firm,that
delivers high quality precision furnitures products to some of the largest and best known companies in far back Asia ,the Regions Of America and Rest of The world for a long time. You will find our high quality furnitures in the BEST products on the market today.
ABOUT US:
About Our Company
Our Vision, Values, Mission and Operating Principles have been developed to
reflect not only our day-to-day work on our core business strategies,but also
to guide us through the challenges and opportunities that come with global
expansion and rapidly changing markets.
Job Description
Your primary task for now , as a representative of the company is to Coordinate
payments from customers and help us with the payment process.You are not
involved in any sales. Once orders are received and sorted we deliver the
product to a customer. After this has been done the customer has to pay for
the products but in most cases we make our clients prepay for orders or items
they order for . About 90 percent of our customers prefer to pay through
Certified Checks or Money Orders drawn from the United State based on the
amount involved.
We have decided to open this new contract -to-hire job position for solving
this problem.
Your First Primary task (Collection of Payments):
1. Receive payment from our Customers or Clients.
2. Cash Payment at your Bank or any cashing facilities near you.
3. Deduct 10 % which will be your percentage/pay on Payment processed
4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay to any of the offices you
will be directed to send payment to (Payment is to be forwarded by Western
Union Money Transfer or Money Gram). Transfer Charges will be deducted from
Our funds.Prospective Finance coordinators should forward their resume or
infos.below if interested:
1. Your Name:
2. Mailing Address:
3. City/State:
4. Zip Code:
5. Phone Number(s):
6. Sex
7. Marital Status
8. Age:
9. E-mail address:
A swift acknowledgment of the receipt of this email will be appreciated.
Thanks For Your Checking to Apply with US.
Mottl Zachary(Staffing and Recruiting Dept)
ASHLEY FURNITURE COMPANY"
Um, ok, let's break this down, shall we?
First of all, the only reason I even started to read it was that this coincidentally arrived at a time when, lo and behold, I happen to be looking for a job to replace my soon-to-be-no-more current employ.
But upon an even casual read, I quickly surmised this to be bogus. And worse than just some ad spam, it's no doubt an attempt to defraud and rip people off in the vein of the now-infamous Nigerian lottery scam emails.
Well, purely on a cursory analysis based on this email's semantics, grammar and cultural awareness, let's go ahead and point out, helpfully perhaps to the scammer, what's wrong with this missive, okay?
Sentence 1:
"We have a job opening for the position of Accounts recievable officer."
Issue A: Unsolicited email "alerts" about job openings are not new. And, in fact, with sites like Monster.com offering publicly viewed resumes available to prospective employers it's sometimes legitimate. Last go-round looking for a job, I got more than a couple offers from real companies, offering real jobs. But, right now, my Monster.com resume is not enabled for public view (mostly 'cause I'm still working on it), and no other site, to my knowledge, is allowing people to see my resume. So this was suspicious point number one.
Issue B: Would a reputable company send out an email to prospective employees with typos? Even if the person assigned to write the email were to accidentally misspell something, they would most likely have written the email contents first in a word processor (with Spell Check enabled) to be reviewed and approved by someone else (their manager or HR department, whatever) so that typos might be caught beforehand by an even casual proofreading. Never mind the Spell Check in the first place.
So why is "receivable" spelled wrong?
"I before E, except after C" anyone?
Sentence 5:
"ASHLEY FURNITURE COMPANY is a well established Manufacturing Firm,that
delivers high quality precision furnitures products to some of the largest and bestknown companies in far back Asia ,the Regions Of America and Rest of The world for a long time."
Wow, okay, um, where do I begin? Let's just go from beginning to end...
Issue C: While the name of the business may at first be recognizable to most Americans as the popular and well-known furniture maker and marketer, it's actually not accurate...the company we are familiar with is Ashley Furniture Industries. (This "error" may have been planned since the originators of this scam may have thought that it would have avoided legal issues. Um, I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that in such a case like this where the two names are similar enough, you wouldn't be able to claim a unique business name status to avoid law suit. It's too similar.)
Issue D: Capitalization of common nouns and verbs within the body of a sentence (other than proper nouns and some pronouns relating to God) have been obsolete in modern English for over a century, yet here we have many words capitalized. While this technique might be used informally to denote importance, it is not proper English, and would not be used in such a real email campaign.
Issue C: "furnitures". At first you might think it's a typo but it's repeated in each instance. The writer thinks this is the proper word describing what most of us would label "furniture". The plural of "furniture" is "furniture"...no "S".
Issue E: "in far back Asia". Huh? Who talks like this? Only persons trying to convey their thoughts in a language they were not as familiar with as their primary language would make this statement. The tricky thing is, if you are trying to figure out it's English accuracy...it's not improper English. It's perfectly acceptable in pure grammar...it's just archaic and weird.
Issue F: "Regions Of America and Rest of The world for a long time."
* Inappropriate capitalization aside, a statement about the extent of the businesses coverage in the US would likely include more info, even on an introductory level. If "regions" were used, they would likey be named as the USA is usually broken up into just a few "regions" for marketing purposes. (ie: the Northeast, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, etc.)
*Well, if indeed the "rest of the world" were true, then why bother itemizing geographical locations in the first place?
Sentence 11 and 12:
"After this has been done the customer has to pay for
the products but in most cases we make our clients prepay for orders or items
they order for . About 90 percent of our customers prefer to pay through
Certified Checks or Money Orders drawn from the United State based on the
amount involved."
Prepay...for furniture? Um, they (the furniture retailers) all offer in-house financing terms since it's expected most purchases (amounting to thousands of dollars) would be on credit.
I would expect the opposite...90% pay on credit. And the idea of using certified checks or money orders...not likely.
The rest:
"Your First Primary task (Collection of Payments):
1. Receive payment from our Customers or Clients.
2. Cash Payment at your Bank or any cashing facilities near you.
3. Deduct 10 % which will be your percentage/pay on Payment processed
4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay to any of the offices you
will be directed to send payment to (Payment is to be forwarded by Western
Union Money Transfer or Money Gram). Transfer Charges will be deducted from
Our funds.Prospective Finance coordinators should forward their resume or
infos.below if interested:
1. Your Name:
2. Mailing Address:
3. City/State:
4. Zip Code:
5. Phone Number(s):
6. Sex
7. Marital Status
8. Age:
9. E-mail address:"
Now it's clear....
1. They send you a check...probably in your name since you are an "employee".
2. You cash it with Ellie-May, the teller at your neighboorhood bank who has been handling all your transactions for years. She trusts the check is good and pays you.
3. You wire the funds to your "employer" and keep the 10% thinking you made out well for such simple work.
4. The "check" bounces. Big surprise. Now you have to pay back your bank what they paid you.
5. Your "employers" are not easy to track down. You never hear from them again.
How sad not only that some idiots would be drawn in by this, but also that Hotmail has been unable to filter this.
Online email accounts used to be relatively spam-free.
Not anymore, I guess.
So I check out my inbox at Hotmail and this, the contents of the most recent email is at the top of the list:
"We have a job opening for the position of Accounts recievable officer. Would
you like to work from your home and get paid weekly? We are offering this
position to all interested applicants. Please carefully read through.
ASHLEY FURNITURE COMPANY is a well established Manufacturing Firm,that
delivers high quality precision furnitures products to some of the largest and best known companies in far back Asia ,the Regions Of America and Rest of The world for a long time. You will find our high quality furnitures in the BEST products on the market today.
ABOUT US:
About Our Company
Our Vision, Values, Mission and Operating Principles have been developed to
reflect not only our day-to-day work on our core business strategies,but also
to guide us through the challenges and opportunities that come with global
expansion and rapidly changing markets.
Job Description
Your primary task for now , as a representative of the company is to Coordinate
payments from customers and help us with the payment process.You are not
involved in any sales. Once orders are received and sorted we deliver the
product to a customer. After this has been done the customer has to pay for
the products but in most cases we make our clients prepay for orders or items
they order for . About 90 percent of our customers prefer to pay through
Certified Checks or Money Orders drawn from the United State based on the
amount involved.
We have decided to open this new contract -to-hire job position for solving
this problem.
Your First Primary task (Collection of Payments):
1. Receive payment from our Customers or Clients.
2. Cash Payment at your Bank or any cashing facilities near you.
3. Deduct 10 % which will be your percentage/pay on Payment processed
4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay to any of the offices you
will be directed to send payment to (Payment is to be forwarded by Western
Union Money Transfer or Money Gram). Transfer Charges will be deducted from
Our funds.Prospective Finance coordinators should forward their resume or
infos.below if interested:
1. Your Name:
2. Mailing Address:
3. City/State:
4. Zip Code:
5. Phone Number(s):
6. Sex
7. Marital Status
8. Age:
9. E-mail address:
A swift acknowledgment of the receipt of this email will be appreciated.
Thanks For Your Checking to Apply with US.
Mottl Zachary(Staffing and Recruiting Dept)
ASHLEY FURNITURE COMPANY"
Um, ok, let's break this down, shall we?
First of all, the only reason I even started to read it was that this coincidentally arrived at a time when, lo and behold, I happen to be looking for a job to replace my soon-to-be-no-more current employ.
But upon an even casual read, I quickly surmised this to be bogus. And worse than just some ad spam, it's no doubt an attempt to defraud and rip people off in the vein of the now-infamous Nigerian lottery scam emails.
Well, purely on a cursory analysis based on this email's semantics, grammar and cultural awareness, let's go ahead and point out, helpfully perhaps to the scammer, what's wrong with this missive, okay?
Sentence 1:
"We have a job opening for the position of Accounts recievable officer."
Issue A: Unsolicited email "alerts" about job openings are not new. And, in fact, with sites like Monster.com offering publicly viewed resumes available to prospective employers it's sometimes legitimate. Last go-round looking for a job, I got more than a couple offers from real companies, offering real jobs. But, right now, my Monster.com resume is not enabled for public view (mostly 'cause I'm still working on it), and no other site, to my knowledge, is allowing people to see my resume. So this was suspicious point number one.
Issue B: Would a reputable company send out an email to prospective employees with typos? Even if the person assigned to write the email were to accidentally misspell something, they would most likely have written the email contents first in a word processor (with Spell Check enabled) to be reviewed and approved by someone else (their manager or HR department, whatever) so that typos might be caught beforehand by an even casual proofreading. Never mind the Spell Check in the first place.
So why is "receivable" spelled wrong?
"I before E, except after C" anyone?
Sentence 5:
"ASHLEY FURNITURE COMPANY is a well established Manufacturing Firm,that
delivers high quality precision furnitures products to some of the largest and bestknown companies in far back Asia ,the Regions Of America and Rest of The world for a long time."
Wow, okay, um, where do I begin? Let's just go from beginning to end...
Issue C: While the name of the business may at first be recognizable to most Americans as the popular and well-known furniture maker and marketer, it's actually not accurate...the company we are familiar with is Ashley Furniture Industries. (This "error" may have been planned since the originators of this scam may have thought that it would have avoided legal issues. Um, I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that in such a case like this where the two names are similar enough, you wouldn't be able to claim a unique business name status to avoid law suit. It's too similar.)
Issue D: Capitalization of common nouns and verbs within the body of a sentence (other than proper nouns and some pronouns relating to God) have been obsolete in modern English for over a century, yet here we have many words capitalized. While this technique might be used informally to denote importance, it is not proper English, and would not be used in such a real email campaign.
Issue C: "furnitures". At first you might think it's a typo but it's repeated in each instance. The writer thinks this is the proper word describing what most of us would label "furniture". The plural of "furniture" is "furniture"...no "S".
Issue E: "in far back Asia". Huh? Who talks like this? Only persons trying to convey their thoughts in a language they were not as familiar with as their primary language would make this statement. The tricky thing is, if you are trying to figure out it's English accuracy...it's not improper English. It's perfectly acceptable in pure grammar...it's just archaic and weird.
Issue F: "Regions Of America and Rest of The world for a long time."
* Inappropriate capitalization aside, a statement about the extent of the businesses coverage in the US would likely include more info, even on an introductory level. If "regions" were used, they would likey be named as the USA is usually broken up into just a few "regions" for marketing purposes. (ie: the Northeast, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, etc.)
*Well, if indeed the "rest of the world" were true, then why bother itemizing geographical locations in the first place?
Sentence 11 and 12:
"After this has been done the customer has to pay for
the products but in most cases we make our clients prepay for orders or items
they order for . About 90 percent of our customers prefer to pay through
Certified Checks or Money Orders drawn from the United State based on the
amount involved."
Prepay...for furniture? Um, they (the furniture retailers) all offer in-house financing terms since it's expected most purchases (amounting to thousands of dollars) would be on credit.
I would expect the opposite...90% pay on credit. And the idea of using certified checks or money orders...not likely.
The rest:
"Your First Primary task (Collection of Payments):
1. Receive payment from our Customers or Clients.
2. Cash Payment at your Bank or any cashing facilities near you.
3. Deduct 10 % which will be your percentage/pay on Payment processed
4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay to any of the offices you
will be directed to send payment to (Payment is to be forwarded by Western
Union Money Transfer or Money Gram). Transfer Charges will be deducted from
Our funds.Prospective Finance coordinators should forward their resume or
infos.below if interested:
1. Your Name:
2. Mailing Address:
3. City/State:
4. Zip Code:
5. Phone Number(s):
6. Sex
7. Marital Status
8. Age:
9. E-mail address:"
Now it's clear....
1. They send you a check...probably in your name since you are an "employee".
2. You cash it with Ellie-May, the teller at your neighboorhood bank who has been handling all your transactions for years. She trusts the check is good and pays you.
3. You wire the funds to your "employer" and keep the 10% thinking you made out well for such simple work.
4. The "check" bounces. Big surprise. Now you have to pay back your bank what they paid you.
5. Your "employers" are not easy to track down. You never hear from them again.
How sad not only that some idiots would be drawn in by this, but also that Hotmail has been unable to filter this.
Online email accounts used to be relatively spam-free.
Not anymore, I guess.